Today's coffee companion is a former colleague. This coffee is the first that has taken place in three countries as the call took place as she travelled from her office in Copenhagen to her home in Malmo. We talked about: how our respective families are getting on the ageing impact of teenage children the way … Continue reading 108th of 100
Category: Themes
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
I was chatting with a friend of mine this morning about the seeming dearth of creativity in her students. Students who are doing a degree in Creative Industries... It reminded me of a particular point in my schooling which in hindsight was pivotal in my own self-belief in my creative abilities for many years. I … Continue reading Drawing a line under creativity
How many organisations have all of their employees working in the same physical location? I'm sure some do, but my hunch is it's the exception not the rule. Whilst one's own experiences are nothing but circumstantial, as I look back at my career, I can't think of a single place where it was the case. … Continue reading All in the office?
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
This week I have learned: that a chance conversation over coffee with someone in San Francisco can be the starting point of a series of actions that ends up with my dad going viral on Twitter. No one saw that coming. the peaks and troughs of account management are bizarre. Weeks pass quietly and then … Continue reading Weeknote 644: Viral
Nearly seven years ago, Chris Weston and I set up WB-40, a podcast loosely about technology. We didn't really know what we were doing, and if you listen to some of the early episodes, that is abundantly clear. A few years later, we were asked to help train some people in a government department technology … Continue reading How to make a podcast
Nudgestock, apparently the world’s biggest festival of behavioural economics, happened last week and I was fortunate to be in attendance in the Old Truman Brewery in London. The year’s theme was “messy”, something close to my own heart. Mess is, to my mind, a prerequisite for creative thinking. Here are 8 messy ideas I collected … Continue reading Eight messy ideas from Nudgestock 2023
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
mmitII 