Bromford Lab
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How To (Re)Build An Innovation Lab
Bromford Lab is dead. But what comes next? And how can we build upon the lessons we learned? Continue reading
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The Batcave of Innovation: Disruptive Thinking in Healthcare
“The biggest users of pagers are drug dealers, Hezbollah and the NHS” Why has Alder Hey Children’s Hospital innovated in ways the NHS cannot? It’s all about First Principles.. Continue reading
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How To Behave In A Legacy Organisation
“I was a Legacy manager in a Legacy organisation. We were mainly caretaking a broken model, trying to make it function better.” Kate Davies It’s always refreshing to hear a CEO, or ex-CEO, offer a pragmatic take on their career… Continue reading
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What Effect Does Environment Have On Our Ability To Think Creatively?
When you think of the “space to innovate” what immediately springs to mind? Is it the physical space , the mental space, the calendar space? All three? I’ve been thinking a lot about spaces and environments this week: specifically what… Continue reading
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Moving From ‘Big Change That Rarely Happens’ To ‘Small Change That Always Does’
We’re obsessed with big change, but what if we’re underestimating the power of the small changes that lie more easily within our reach? Continue reading
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Why The Employee Idea Scheme Doesn’t Work
The concept of asking employees to share their ideas to drive innovation is always a good one. Unfortunately, the traditional suggestion scheme is, in my opinion, not the way to go about it. Continue reading
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Three Reasons Why We Fail To Solve Problems
Why do some problems get solved whilst others stick around? Here are three examples of why we sometimes fail and what we could do differently. Continue reading
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Innovating In An Age Of Uncertainty
Faced with uncertainty, those holding the purse strings will be tempted to stop the clock, peddle simplistic solutions and retreat to the past Continue reading
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Death By Zoom: Have We Failed The Mass Home Working Experiment?
One of the few positives of the pandemic lockdown was the opportunity to reset the way in which we spend our working day. This was the chance to prove that remote work actually works. As someone whose job it is… Continue reading
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Did A Virus Just Bring About The End Of The Office?
Remote work has accelerated 10 years in 10 days. The only thing that could pull people back to the office is the ego of the bad middle manager scared of losing control – Chris Herd The revolution in remote working… Continue reading
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What Coronavirus Tells Us About Risk
As I sit down to write this post I’ve just received an email from a weekly design blog I subscribe to. This edition is titled , alarmingly, ‘Pandemic Prep’. It begins “We are interrupting our regularly scheduled newsletter format and… Continue reading
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Moving From The Reactive To The Pre-Emptive
As Matthew Manos has written, many of us in the social sector are employed in the expectation that the things that go wrong will always go wrong. Indeed, our work often profits from past societal failure rather than the contemplation… Continue reading
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How Technology Can Increase Collaboration And Build Trust
This post is an shortened version of a plenary talk delivered in Cardiff for the Wales Audit Office Depending on your age it’s likely that the two things you were not taught in school were: a) how to collaborate effectively… Continue reading
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What If We Replaced All Our Managers With Robots?
Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done Peter Drucker Management is the greatest inefficiency in any organisation. Many of you will be familiar with the work of Gary Hamel , but his… Continue reading
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Why We Are So Bad At Defining Problems
If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions. – Albert Einstein I don’t know whether Einstein ever used those words. It may be just like… Continue reading
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How To Kill Ideas
We were asked a really good question last week with the visit to Bromford of the Disruptive Innovators Network. How long should you spend on an idea? In the early days of Bromford Lab we had a 12 WEEKS MAX rule.… Continue reading
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Lessons Learned From Five Years of Failure
Sometimes the execution of the idea doesn’t need to be the best to succeed. In 1989 a video game designer called Gunpei Yokoi changed the world with the launch of the original Nintendo Game Boy. It took gaming out of… Continue reading
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The Social Sector Must Rebuild Trust Through Equal Partnerships
This is a edited version of an article originally written for Inside Housing There is a growing realisation that many of our social institutions and public services have run their course. Communities need something different from what’s currently on offer.… Continue reading
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Creating The Right Culture For Innovation and Change
I’m not sure I buy into the concept of organisations having a culture of innovation. After all, innovation is a process consisting of four things: Having an idea that solves a problem Doing something with that idea Proving that it… Continue reading
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The Fruitless Quest For Inbox Zero: Eight Tips To Protect Your Time
You can seek to impose order on your inbox all you like – but eventually you’ll need to confront the fact that the deluge of messages, and the urge you feel to get them all dealt with, aren’t really about… Continue reading
Paul Taylor 