Tag: Bromford Lab
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. We could be at the tipping point, the moment when future relationships between citizens and ...
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 delivers new value for people Translating it into reality and making it part of the ...
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 technology. They’re manifestations of larger, more personal dilemmas – Oliver Burkeman At the back-end of ...
If We Want Different Relationships, The Doing Must Be New And Different Too
You can't change a relationship without actually changing your behaviour.
Minority Dissent: Why Intelligent People Fail To Solve Problems
At the end of November 2018 my blog posts dried up. I’ve not published one for over seven weeks – the longest gap for a couple of years. The problem wasn’t that I had nothing to write, rather I was afraid of the reaction to what I’d say. I have five draft posts I’ve struggled to ...
Nine Ways To Unlock Creativity In Your Organisation
Some organisations are obsessive about finding the silver bullet—the one-shot wonder that solves everything. In an effort to strengthen performance, we’ll often make disproportionate investments in a single initiative to invoke change. Others are fixed on generating ideas – jumping towards uncontrolled creativity as the solution. However most of our organisations don’t suffer from a ...
Failure: We Need To Move From Slow And Stupid To Fast And Intelligent
In the history of pointless technology, it takes a lot to beat the Twitter Peek. Aimed at those interested in Twitter, but who didn’t own a smartphone, it asked customers to spend $100 plus a monthly subscription. With the benefit of hindsight, it was clearly designed to solve a problem that didn’t really exist. If you were ...
We Need To Be Boringly Reliable and Radically Disruptive – At The Same Time
Our organisations are generally bad at innovation. That’s because they are designed that way. Just as your body is designed to fight a common cold, most of our cultures protect the organisational DNA from any foreign antibodies. Add something new and it can get rejected. It’s not personal. It’s just an automatic survival mechanism. Purposeful thinking – ...
5 Reasons You Need To Question What Customers Are Telling You
Despite little evidence of impact, each year millions of pounds are spent on market research, focus groups, and ‘coproduction’. The danger of listening to customers is you end up focusing on wants not needs. Often what a customer wants is diametrically opposed to what they need – and want is often more of a powerful ...
Ending The Myth Of Collaboration
The best organisational cultures are tolerant of the loner, the thinker. – John Wade “If I was you,” said a colleague recently “now would be a very good time to involve customers, to get more people involved”. No, I thought, right now that would be the worst thing we could do. Collaboration can kill creativity. ...
