You've probably heard of survivorship bias. It's the mistake of studying only winners: the companies that made it, the founders who broke through, while ignoring the far larger number who tried the same things and failed. It's a well-documented problem. But there's a second mistake that follows directly from it, and yet people don’t seem … Continue reading The Actionable Insight Fallacy
Category: General
A friend of mine is a copywriter. We recently messaged about AI and what it means for her work, and I suggested that her job wasn’t really about writing words. She was, understandably, a little prickly about this. Her response, once the initial reaction passed, was this: “I suppose my initial reaction is to feel … Continue reading What do you actually do?
Once upon a time, maybe in the middle of the decade before last, there was an idea that was called "Bring Your Own Device". iPhones and MacBook Airs showed that computing devices didn't need to be heavy and ugly. They could be light and stylish, with batteries that lasted more than an hour. The mostly … Continue reading Roll Your Own Software
Most of the prose produced in most organisations is, at best, mediocre. Business cases, status update reports, performance reviews, job descriptions, policies and procedures, terms and conditions, onboarding documentation, strategy documents, change request forms, tender responses... the list goes on. Bilge, for the most part, the lot of it. Documents over which hours of effort … Continue reading Good enough
I had a conversation with a colleague yesterday about AI and how fast everything seems to be moving. The sense that this time feels genuinely different. That we're in the middle of something exponential. It reminded me of a piece I wrote back in 2014. The argument then was simple: despite all the noise about … Continue reading Is it really happening that quickly? 2025 edition
There's a reasonably well-known principle in software engineering circles called Chesterton's Fence. The idea, borrowed from the writer G.K. Chesterton, is simple: don't remove a fence until you understand why it was put there. It's become a useful corrective to the "move fast and break things" mentality — a reminder that the people who came before … Continue reading Chesterton’s Hedge
Over the past two weeks, I’ve been doing a civic duty as a juror at the local Crown Court. Before starting last week, I’d become a bit concerned that I would be spending quite a bit of time looking at how society goes wrong. I studied enough Criminology at university to know that poverty, drug … Continue reading Civic duty
I am, however I look at it, getting quite old. I'm old enough to remember the 1970s and the Christmas present I received, a CBM Electronic Calculator. I was amazed by how I could enter numbers and symbols, and the machine would return correct calculations. I'm old enough to remember the first experience at home … Continue reading Technonovelty
For many years, I've had a pet theory that you can tell a huge amount about the culture and values of an organisation from what you see and experience in their office reception area. Some examples: A large insurance company I visited in the City of London some years ago had toilets available for visitors … Continue reading Software as signs
Back in my mid-thirties, as you may already know, I spent a couple of years employed in the world of management and leadership development. I spent my days working with managers from across all sorts of organisations and at all sorts of levels helping them to discover better ways in which they could lead and … Continue reading Situational AI
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