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
Category: Other Stuff
"Dump and clump" exercises are a fairly common tool in the world of workshop facilitation. Get people to think individually about a topic, and write down the things they think about on individual PostIt notes. ("No, Jeremy. One idea per PostIt note, please. Don't worry, it's not your stationery budget.") You then get people to … Continue reading Snap!
From my years of work, there are a few models and ideas that keep coming back to me. One of those is the Conscious Competence Ladder, a way of thinking about how we learn things that is attributed to Noel Burch from a company called Gordon Training. The idea is quite straightforward. We are either … Continue reading Starting
Back in October 2019, in those days we fondly remember as "before Covid" I joined RHP, a relatively small social housing provider based in South West London that provides around 6,500 rented homes to people in the area in which I've lived for the last 17 years. I have learned a huge amount in that … Continue reading On housing
We don’t really talk much about finishing jobs. There’s a whole industry about starting new jobs - the first 90 days and all that jazz. But how to finish up - well… Searching the World Wide Web it’s notable how starting a job is framed positively, yet if you search for finishing up an old … Continue reading On finishing
I spent some time last week with someone involved in business development for a tech consulting firm. The starting point was a question about what sorts of things might attract people to participate in online events. This isn’t quite how the conversation went, but it does recall some of the challenges I think online event … Continue reading Why I struggle with online events
There's a story that is embedded in my mind from my time in my very first job nearly three decades ago.A friend of mine was dying. Lymphoma. He'd been in and out of treatment for months, but this trip into hospital looked like it would be his last. Every week we had a meeting for … Continue reading “Other models of masculinity are available”
The world is suffering from Zoom exhaustion, apparently. We find ourselves in a state of permameeting, where hours become but interchangeable units of attention mediated through Zoom, Teams, Meet or, for the really unfortunate, WebEx. Because back in the (prepandemic) day, meetings were great, right? It's not like HBR were publishing articles like this but … Continue reading Zoomed out?
For the last 18 months or so I've been on a conscious, if somewhat haphazard, path to read more about issues of inequality and privilege. I'm white, male, straight, middle-aged, middle class and relatively wealthy. That's about as privileged as one can be in Britain in 2021. I was also brought up in the 1970s … Continue reading Educating myself
It's a bit over four years now since Chris Weston indulged me with a request to work together on a podcast. Having been involved with student radio in my university days (a really valuable introduction into audio production which helped massively), there had been an itch to be scratched. 170-something episodes, 100-something guests and a … Continue reading How we make WB-40
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