Yesterday marked the formal start of user research in the latest project, a business change programme to help the people in a government body to take advantage of new cloud-based collaborative technologies.There's a lot that has been done in the UK public sector over the past seven years to instil agile approaches into the way … Continue reading Change as an design challenge
Category: Management
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
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
This week I've wrapped up another engagement working for the Common Technology Services programme in the Government Digital Service. With two stints working in the pan-Government group now under my belt, I'm left wondering a few things about how technology is managed not only within the public sector, but in big organisations more generally. To … Continue reading Another golden triangle
In one of those literary side alleys of which I occasionally turn, I'm currently reading Keith Johnstone's seminal work Impro, which came recommended by theatre produced Phelim McDermott with whom I had a fascinating conversation a few months ago. Fairly early on in the book, Johnstone talks about his own discovery of the work of Joseph Wolpe … Continue reading Metathesiophobia
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
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
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
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