Bromford Lab
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If We Want Different Relationships, The Doing Must Be New And Different Too
You can’t change a relationship without actually changing your behaviour. Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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,… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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,… Continue reading
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We Need To Promote Outcomes At Work Not Presenteeism
“Presenteeism is the biggest threat to UK workplace productivity. Workers coming in and doing nothing is more dangerous than absenteeism” – Professor Cary Cooper A full car park and people appearing busy at their desks is zero evidence that any… Continue reading
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Complex Problems Require Rapid Experiments
“Multiple iterations almost always beat a single-minded commitment to building your first idea” – Peter Skillman Most of you will have taken part in the Marshmallow Challenge or a variant of it. It’s the team exercise where you get a… Continue reading
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How Do We Know Our Organisations Are Really Succeeding?
Every day, organisations promise to make the world a better place. How do we know they are really succeeding? The National Health Service we are told is the world’s best healthcare system. Yet the NHS has a poor record on one fairly… Continue reading
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Technology Won’t Kill Meetings – But We Can
Technology failed us. We thought the world of work was to be reimagined. The death of the office. The end of email. A utopia of work/life integration fueled by work-where-you-want technology. It hasn’t happened. Six years ago 2.8 million people… Continue reading
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Why Change Fails: Four Ways To Hack Your Culture
All over the the world our organisations are experiencing profound change. The most common way to react to that is the corporate change programme. Every year businesses will embark on a series of reports , meetings, visioning sessions , training… Continue reading
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We need to encourage organisations to seek risk – and forgive failure
“I’ve focused on the idea of failure being the engine for innovation. Not being afraid of failure but seeing it as a learning opportunity, and the value of getting out into the world and testing things earlier rather than later.”… Continue reading
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12 Months of Failure: Lessons Learned in Year One of Bromford Lab
Guest post by Tom Hartland One year ago the Bromford Lab was established as a way of accelerating new ideas, driving innovation in the business and building our external networks. ‘Failing fast’ was a founding principle, any idea was a… Continue reading
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Five Questions for Prospective Digital Leaders
Engaged leadership in the digital era means not chasing the latest apps and gadgets. Being an engaged leader in the digital era means knowing what your goals are and what tools to use to achieve them. It also means being… Continue reading
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Lessons From a Year Spent on a Two Pizza Team
Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team – Steve Wozniak In the early years of Amazon , as the… Continue reading
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How to Make Innovation Part of Everyone’s Job
The average colleague has seven ideas per day about how they could improve where they work. For our company that’s 9000 ideas per day. Or 3 million every year. But most of those ideas never catch fire. – Bromford Lab Tokyo,… Continue reading
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The End of Trust (and how organisations can rebuild it)
We’ve seen an alarming evaporation of trust across all institutions, reaching the lows of the recession in 2009. Trust in government, business, media and non-profits is below 50% in two-thirds of countries, including the U.S, U.K, Germany and Japan. There has… Continue reading
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How To Get Better At Failing
“Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before.” Neil Gaiman Just before Christmas – in my final catch up of the year with my manager – a pretty significant thing happened. I was told that… Continue reading
Paul Taylor 