I've observed something over the years that I've started calling "regression to form". It's the depressing inevitability that if you give people something that looks even vaguely like a form, they will treat it as a form. As a result, the objective shifts from thinking to form-filling. From conversation to completion. From understanding to box-ticking.Take … Continue reading Regression to form
Category: Management
In last week’s WB-40, guest Rufus Evison drew an interesting analogy between how LLMs work and Daniel Kahneman’s Fast and Slow thinking model. Rufus described how LLM responses are “fast”, almost instinctive based on past experiences and pattern matching, and the problem with them is that they need to be more “slow”, deliberative and logical. … Continue reading The Messy Truth About “Thinking” Machines
I've been thinking lately about how we're rather good at solving problems, but surprisingly bad at identifying what the problems actually are. Take the double diamond process that every design consultant worth their salt will draw on a whiteboard: diverge to explore numerous solutions, converge to select the best one, diverge again to prototype, and … Continue reading The problem with problems
I'll be turning 54 next month. I know, I barely look a day over 52. In my brain, however, I'm still waiting for the morning I wake up and feel like a grown-up. But despite my increasing years and abandoned hairline, I can't really remember a time in my life when I wasn't surrounded by … Continue reading The 4Cs of Computing
In the dark days of Covid, I set up a toy experiment on the place we used to call Twitter. I was fascinated by my coffee machine. In particular, the patterns that would emerge on the top of my morning Latte after preparation. Unlike in posh coffee shops where a trained barista will create intricate … Continue reading Seeing patterns
About the only idea from the world of Game Theory that I know that I know is a thought experiment called The Prisoner's Dilemma. It goes something like this: You've been arrested. Your accomplice has been arrested. You are both told that if you snitch on the other you'll be let free. If you are … Continue reading The Prisoner’s D-AI-lemma
I'm the sort of person who has favourite Laws of Social Science. To be specific, my two favourite Laws of Social Science are Goodhart's Law and Campbell's Law. To summarise them, Goodhart's Law states that if a measurement is used as a goal, the meaning of that measure changes (usually for the worse). Campbell's Law … Continue reading Measuring RTO
In one of my #100Coffees conversations this week I was reminded of a framework I came across in my days of working in Learning & Development called the Kirkpatrick Model. I'll come to the model shortly, but it was recalled because I was talking about a recent conversation I had on LinkedIn about the dangers … Continue reading Value over time
A few years ago I had a fascinating conversation with a journalist about a particular aspect of the psychology of working in an office. He told me that when he needed to read a book as part of his work, in the office he found it impossible because of an overbearing feeling that reading a … Continue reading A subversive sixty minutes
In Claire L Evans' wonderful book Broad Band: The untold story of the women who made the internet there is a particularly interesting observation about how a conference held in 1968 in the Bavarian ski resort of Garmisch had a huge impact on the gender bias in the computing industry. In the late 1960s there … Continue reading Prompt Midwives
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