Simon Penny

  • Techno-admin, Microtransactions and Designing For Humanity

    Techno-admin: a pervasive phenomenon, whereby we customers are forced into infuriating, confusing, absurdly time-consuming and bleakly unrewarding tasks by a machine We are all techno-administrators today. The average person has about 100 passwords to keep track of, a spiralling number of emails… Continue reading

    Techno-admin, Microtransactions and Designing For Humanity
  • Designing For Connection Rather Than Transaction

    Health is not made in health systems, it’s made in homes, in communities, in workplaces. So unless we can build horizontal bonds between communities and the kind of expertise and resource in health systems, we can’t really make change. Hilary… Continue reading

    Designing For Connection Rather Than Transaction
  • 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

    Why The Employee Idea Scheme Doesn’t Work
  • Moving Beyond Command And Control

    The natural reaction of the rule maker when people start breaking the rules is not to redesign them, or seek to understand why, but to issue yet more rules. Continue reading

    Moving Beyond Command And Control
  • Black Swans Can Inspire A New Era of Innovation

    A black swan is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences. Black swan events are characterized by their extreme rarity, their severe impact, and the widespread insistence they were… Continue reading

    Black Swans Can Inspire A New Era of Innovation
  • 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

    What If We Replaced All Our Managers With Robots? 
  • 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

    Why We Are So Bad At Defining Problems
  • 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

    The Social Sector Must Rebuild Trust Through Equal Partnerships
  • 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

    Ending The Myth Of Collaboration
  • 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

    How Do We Know Our Organisations Are Really Succeeding?