Last week I wrote up one of the games I've been playing with groups, here's the next one... Game - Competing objectives Objective: organisations are often trying to get teams working together more effectively. Yet at the same time those same organisations will set individual and team objectives in such a way that makes effective … Continue reading Play Games (2)
Category: innovation
I heard a terribly depressing thing from one of my clients yesterday: We don't have time for the luxury of play It's a sentiment that I hear in one way or another from many of the organisations with which I work. That the Calvinist ethic of hard work has lead to a focus on efficiency … Continue reading Making time for play
For the past couple of years I've been playing with the concept of play. At the core of my thinking is the idea that as we progress into adulthood most of us systematically remove our abilities to tinker with things, play with them to no particular end so that we can explore them. This is … Continue reading Play games…
There are two moments in my life that have stuck with me since as some of the most intense and visceral memories I possess. The first was when I was around seven years old. I was at school, Watford Fields, a draughty old Victorian place where I was from five to eight. We arrived as … Continue reading The power of being totally confused
Back in my later days at BBC Worldwide in the early 2000s, I commissioned a piece of research to look at the habits that our staff had in their use of file storage and email. The work, looking back, was relatively unusual. I brought in a social scientist to do a piece of ethnographic research … Continue reading The ubiquitous inbox
I'm currently reading Tim Harford's excellent new tome Fifty Things that made the Modern Economy. Based on his BBC Radio series, it charts ideas and objects that have created the world around us today. Some of them are obvious (the Light Bulb), some of them less so (the Billy Bookcase). In his description of the … Continue reading The middle of the journey
Someone somewhere in Silicon Valley right now... Yeah, so like, what we wanted to do was to reinvent the brake. There's just too much friction invoked with brakes. Users don't want friction. They want frictionless. They crave frictionless. So we took the friction out of brakes. These are brakes re-invented. Stopping 2.0. Because, like, who … Continue reading The importance of friction
We'd like to do something really innovate. Can you show us how you've done that before? If I had a pound for every time that I'd heard that from clients, prospects and elsewhere over the last few years, then I'd be a richer man. Well, at least a couple of months of Amazon Prime subscription-richer. As … Continue reading The power of people
A fascinating evening last night at the Hidden Edge Club's networking event at the rather lovely Soho Hotel. The theme - Competing with Digital Natives - and I was honoured to be part of the panel discussion exploring themes around digitization, and how traditional companies can react to competition from pure-play digital businesses (and particularly the big … Continue reading The myths of disruption
A week tomorrow brings the Minimum Viable Workplace workshop in London, a piece of collaboration that started with a conversation with Anne Marie Rattray in the Spring. We've got a dozen or more people from all sorts of organisations and background coming together to discuss and explore the ways in which organisations provide the platforms for … Continue reading Providing platforms for work
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