The more I read about the field of Behavioural Economics the more I think that maybe the entire discipline is an increasingly complex set of workarounds to address the more fundamental issue that the science of economics is failing us. It takes a lot to shift an entire academic discipline's mindset, and the period leading … Continue reading Copernicus
Category: Cult of measurement
Numbers are so alluring. Our steps. Our likes. Our "friends". And like Pavlov and his slobbering canines, we get trained to respond to these numbers. But these numbers become self-serving. They become not a means to an end, but an end in their own right. They change their meaning accordingly, and then people game systems … Continue reading Pavlov’s metric
That was the question that David Terrar posed yesterday morning when tweeting a link to an HBR article that stated what many of us know to be the bleedin’ obvious: you can teach people to be more “creative”. You Can Teach Someone to Be More Creative https://t.co/CzQLt8XTbz - so why are thinking skills so rarely … Continue reading So why are thinking skills so rarely taught?
The dust has had some time to settle now on last week's Nadellagate, and it's left me thinking that the tech industry, and IT in particular, has a deeper issue of lack of a diversity of thought of which gender bias is just a symptom. I'm not one who particularly believes in diversity for diversity's … Continue reading Limited memepools
Yesterday I found myself in a couple of conversations that revolved around what has been a bit of a recurring theme for me - the dangerous downside of measuring things. The first was around the gender inequality evident in the IT industry. My own view is that this is a symptom of a more pervasive … Continue reading Don’t count on it
I'm very lucky to live in the stereotypical leafy South West London suburb of Teddington. Close to the open spaces of Richmond and Bushy Parks, with a thriving local independent shopping centre, great schools and other amenities. The best way to illustrate what sort of a place Teddington is is when I saw dog poo … Continue reading Leading questions
"#HR needs to stop reporting and start predicting" - Michael Carty, twitter.com/mjcarty The quote above from Michael on Twitter this morning (you can see the full thing here https://twitter.com/MJCarty/status/493812100138287104) got me thinking. It mostly got me thinking about how I seem to be developing a particular breed of Big Data iconoclasm these days. The reason Michael's … Continue reading Big data: The tyranny of the past
Last week I had the pleasure of spending some time with IT Directors and CIOs from a broad spectrum of UK organisations on board Aurora for the Spring 2014 IT Directors' Forum. It's the second of these events that I've attended, and it was noticeable this time around that in comparison to two years … Continue reading Relative value
There is a piece that Adrian Bridgewater has published on Computer Weekly about collaboration tools that's got me seriously concerned about the ability for enterprise software to do anything outside of the realm of Taylorist scientific management. Adrian's article looks at trends in the collaboration space that seem to be moving from focusing on humans … Continue reading Reverting to process
The world of customer engagement is a funny, almost bi-polar place. On the one hand it should be totally people-centric, as it's the place where companies converse with their customers. Except it's in many cases completely industrial - a world of de-skilled white collar work where the production line, six-sigma approaches of manufacturing have been deployed … Continue reading Customer engagement bypass
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