There was one line in Aditya Chakrabortty's column yesterday about Jeremy Corbyn's ascent to the leadership of the Labour Party that got me thinking... Moments before his final campaign rally last Thursday, I asked Corbyn how much of a work-in-progress his opposition would be. A lot, came the answer: everything hung on who would join … Continue reading Agile Politics
Category: Hobby horses
In a panel discussion organised by the global pay-wall provider The Times this week, Baroness Lane-Fox of the Interwebs apparently suggested that the UK government should scrap investment into the HS2 programme in favour of high speed internet infrastructure. She's wrong. We need both. And the irony for me is that both of these initiatives … Continue reading Platforms come in many forms
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
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
The dust isn't yet settled on the UK's General Election, but one element that is already getting coverage is the gap between opinion polling before the ballot, the exit poll, and what appears to be the final outcome. After weeks of pollsters predicting a result "too close to call", the exit poll published when the … Continue reading Sampling
A frequent refrain in UK election coverage at the moment is that this is the UK's first "Social Media" election. The truth is that five years is an awfully long time in media and technology these days, and the dynamics of communications for this year's ballot are vastly different to the last... The Social Media … Continue reading The (insert Tech buzzword) Election
The problem with Legacy IT as a metaphor is quite simple: to the whole rest of the world, a legacy is a good thing. If you're trying to get people to see something as bad, it's really, really important not to hamper your mission by naming it after something good. We might as well call … Continue reading Crap Tech Metaphors: 14 Legacy IT
As part of my work for central government, over the past few weeks I've been immersing myself in the work of Tim O'Reilly and the concepts of Government as a Platform. The concept at its heart is a metaphor. In fact a metaphor of a metaphor which is always a slightly risky approach prone to … Continue reading Platform thinking
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?
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