Paul Taylor

  • 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 the hands of geeks and paved the way for the industry to become the most…

    Paul Taylor

  • 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…

    Paul Taylor

  • How To Avoid Innovation Theatre

    Consistent investment, dedicated teams, proper evidencing of decisions, alignment with strategy. A simple but critical recipe for innovation in future-ready organisations – Tom Cheesewright One of the questions I get asked most frequently is“How do you define innovation?” This week I’ve been asked it several times so here’s a short post to recap my thoughts.…

    Paul Taylor

  • The Danger Of Listening To People Who Talk A Lot

    Research indicates that even when everyone within a group recognizes who the subject matter expert is, they defer to that member just 62% of the time; when they don’t, they listen to the most extroverted person – Khalil Smith Innovation must be founded on a deep understanding of the problem we are seeking to solve. It…

    Paul Taylor

  • Why We Need To Learn To Love Project Managers

    ‘There isn’t a child alive who dreams of being a project manager’ –  so said Scott Berkun. He pointed out that project managers can unintentionally reinforce their work as (let’s be honest) dull – by trying to get everyone to pay attention to spreadsheets, specifications, PowerPoint presentations and status reports, failing to realise these are the…

    Paul Taylor

  • How To Kill Innovation In 10 Easy Steps

    Many of our organisations, without realising it, act as inhibitors of innovation. Rules and protocols are put in place — often for very good reasons — that preserve the status quo. Over time, organisations develop a set of social norms — ‘the way we do things around here’ designed to protect the business from failure.…

    Paul Taylor

  • How To Find And Kill Zombie Projects

    According to Clayton Christensen , of the 30,000 new consumer products that are launched each year – 95% fail. Compare this with the public, voluntary and non-profit sectors – where hardly anything fails. The social sector must either be fantastic at launching new initiatives, or there’s a lot of things going on that shouldn’t still be living.…

    Paul Taylor

  • Stop Talking, Start Experimenting

    Thinking different isn’t enough, you have to act different – Jorge Barba I took a call this week from a person working for another organisation, we’ll call her Bill. Despite having a hugely supportive executive team the problems Bill faces are numerous: Managers are asking why are we working on a new initiative when the…

    Paul Taylor

  • 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 load of spaghetti, some tape, a marshmallow, a piece of string, and 18 minutes to…

    Paul Taylor

  • How Much Good Does Your Organisation Really Achieve?

    We don’t usually think of achievements in terms of what would have happened otherwise, but we should. What matters is not who does good but whether good is done.” ― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better We all love an uplifting story of a simple innovation that solves a tricky social problem. Anyone who’s been to…

    Paul Taylor

  • Embracing Challenge to Build a Stronger Innovation Culture

      Just as your body is designed to fight a common cold, most of our cultures protect the organisational DNA from any antibodies. Add something new and it can get rejected. As Chris Bolton has written organisations can have immune systems and idea antibodies. As Chris says – It’s not personal. It’s just an automatic survival mechanism.…

    Paul Taylor

  • Why Collaboration Does Not Equal Innovation

    Transformation can’t happen without discovery and discovery can’t happen without experimentation. It’s a new year and at Bromford we are planning a reboot of our approach to innovation (actually we are planning a reboot of everything). My emerging thoughts are we need less talk of accelerated fast fail innovation and more a systemic and systematic…

    Paul Taylor

  • Is Your Organisation Making The Impossible Possible?

    2016 was the year the social media bubble burst. The year we woke up to the fact that – despite what Twitter and Facebook tell us – a lot of people think exactly the opposite to what we do. It was us, not them, who were in a bubble. I spent New Year travelling –…

    Paul Taylor

  • How To Fast Track Innovation

    If you speak at conferences about innovation you’ll almost always encounter some frustrated people. They approach you at the end, or contact you a few days later. They often have one thing in common. They, and others like them , have ideas that are being shut down because they don’t fit the system. They tend not…

    Paul Taylor

  • Why You Need To Selectively Forget Your Own Past

    Reset All Assumptions We must selectively forget the past. That means not accepting current practices but challenging underlying assumptions, our solutions and mindsets, and the way we tackle the problem. We need services designed as people need them – not as we have learned to do them. Bromford Design Principle 1 (Draft) I’m doing some work at…

    Paul Taylor

  • Can Working Out Loud Inspire Creativity and Inclusion?

    Collaboration – for all the rhetoric – is much harder , and for many of us less preferable, than working in isolation. Today we’ve woken up to find the  UK has made a historic choice. A choice that could be interpreted as a desire to go it alone rather than working with others. To seize…

    Paul Taylor

  • How To Kill Creativity (And How To Rebuild It)

    Many of our organisations , without realising it , act as inhibitors of innovation. Rules and protocols are put in place — often for very good reasons — that preserve the status quo. Over time, organisations develop a set of social norms — ‘the way we do things around here’ designed to protect the business from failure. One of the biggest inhibitors of…

    Paul Taylor

  • Holiday in Cambodia: 13 Innovations in Pictures

    In 1975 Cambodia attempted the most radical reinvention of society and community in history. This was ‘Year Zero’ – a beginning of a new era where people would return to a mythic past. Self sufficiency and collectivism were promoted, technology and creativity mistrusted. City dwellers, professionals and intellectuals returned to toil the land alongside peasants. About 1.7…

    Paul Taylor

  • We Need Less Talk of Innovation and More Evidence of Impact

    In my last post I looked at why change fails and how most corporate programmes are destined for failure. Year on year, huge resources are invested in them. Yet we somehow hope for a different outcome.  The biggest reason change fails is employee resistance. Indeed – it’s the downfall of nearly 40% of programmes. However,…

    Paul Taylor

  • 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.” – Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots, Google X Risk is still a toxic word across much…

    Paul Taylor

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