The world has changed. We used to talk about the online world and the real world. There is no longer such a distinction. Our realities are a synthesis of things in the physical world, things in the digital realm and stuff in our heads. The biggest part, as it's ever been, is the stuff in … Continue reading Mixed reality
Category: Themes
I have a new rule of life. If I decide to complete a customer satisfaction survey I will bail out at any point there is a Net Promoter Score (NPS) question. NPS, if you aren't aware, is a magic number. By tracking NPS you can excel at customer service; at least that's how the story … Continue reading Recommending
Today I'm spending a bit of time reviewing the recording of my interview with Phelim McDermott, one of the founders of the improvisational theatre company Improbable. I was introduced to Phelim by Neil Mullarkey, one of my earlier interviewees. I like the chain reaction nature of discovering people to talk to. Early on in the … Continue reading 17. Book Reset: tangential
I spent some time this week talking about innovation with a client, a privately-held and owner-managed business operating in the UK. One of the challenges that was identified by the people with whom I was working was that there didn't appear to be clear channels through which good ideas could bubble up through the ranks … Continue reading Innovation networks
Data. The new oil. In that you wouldn't want to cover a puffin in the stuff. The current obsession with data is predicated on one major assumption: that the data that organisations have amassed has some sort of integrity. If it doesn't, then its value is dubious. I have started to make a distinction between … Continue reading Garbage In
The world of work isn't somewhere where people just exclusively work. They talk about all sorts of stuff- what they watched on TV last night; the results in their favourite sports; politics; love; life... In my research for Who Shares Wins I found a possibly apocryphal tale of the adoption of email in a law … Continue reading The power of tittle-tattle
I'm currently reading Christian Madsbjerg's excellent and highly recommended Sensemaking. At the core of the book is the proposition that whilst the modern world has become obsessed with what Madsbjerg terms thin data (mostly - numbers), to make sense of the work around us we also need to take account of thick data - emotions, relationships, context - … Continue reading Through thick and thin
There are some amazing developments emerging into the mainstream as a result of technologies badged variously as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, Natural Language Processing and other whizzy-sounding titles. But alongside any new wave of technology comes a tsunami of marketing hype, overblown expectations, silver bullets and rainbow-pooping unicorns. Non-technologists and technologists alike need to … Continue reading 6 questions to consider when in the path of the oncoming robot overlords.
Much of yesterday was spent at an ERP vendor event listening to the usual combination of analyst ("cloud is good, data is great"), vendor ("you should buy or product") and vendor client ("you should buy their product because we did") speakers. One big theme is that AI and machine intelligence will enable companies to achieve … Continue reading How big is your data lake?
I'm a qualitative kinda guy. My worldview is one shaped more by stories than numbers. At my core I like to think that most people, really, are like me. But I also know that I am probably wrong. I viscerally react against the quantitative. That's almost a definition of the qualitative mindset, I guess. Gut … Continue reading Organisational subjectives
