Back in the middle of the last decade I spent a couple of years working in management training. It was a remarkable time for my learning, even though I was supposed to be there for the learning of others. Each month our performance would be assessed on the basis of the "happy sheets" - the … Continue reading Five ways to rig your speaker feedback scores
Category: Themes
Another topic that was getting much coverage at last week's Spark the Change conference was that of failing, failure and the ability to learn from getting things wrong. As I wrote a few weeks ago I wonder if a substantial part of the problem which faces organisations in allowing people to do things that don't work … Continue reading Failure, disproof, and unholy f-ups
I spent a thoroughly thought-provoking couple of days last week at the first Spark the Change conference in the City of London. There were many varied takes on the way in which change is affecting organisations, and how to make it happen more effectively. The variety of thinking, from the bleeding edge of Holocracy … Continue reading Meetings – the continuity provider
I've got a rough and ready rule for assessing whether a website is kosher or not. Is there an easily accessible "About" page. It's not infallible, but if that basic test isn't passed I get a bit suspicious. At yesterday's Spark the Change conference there was a presentation from a representative from the US-based "platform … Continue reading Accountability
I had a conversation on Twitter today regarding the long-term future of the currently wildly successful GoPro cameras. It had struck me that GoPro might well go the same way as, say GPS manufacturers like TomTom or at a greater extreme manufacturers of compact digital stills cameras. Both of those markets have been eroded significantly with … Continue reading Specialism
I just came across an old article from Jerry Fishenden proposing how a more Creative Commons approach to the giving of personal data permissions. The way in which we give and store data about ourselves is based on a very old model at it's core. Somehow data about us becomes "their" data, and then we have … Continue reading Whose data? My data!
Buried within the plethora of news coming out of the Google IO event yesterday is that Google are apparently including security features that Samsung have developed under the brand Knox into the next release of Android. I don't know anything about Knox, but the concept at a high level seems to me to … Continue reading The work/not work divide
A couple of weeks ago I got into a rather spirited conversation on Twitter with, amongst other people, Charles Arthur of The Guardian and Max Tatton-Brown contributor to The Telegraph. It's scary that my descent into middle age is flagged by the fact that I seem to be agreeing with the latter much more than the former … Continue reading The price of data, the cost of privacy
As I talk with people across a range of organisations about innovation and disruption, a common theme emerges - that of how we need to be able to become more accepting of failure. Failure is how we learn. We need to fail fast and fail often. It strikes me that, whilst the sentiment is … Continue reading Banning failure
Here's an interesting little connection for you... Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google, both went through Montessori education. The Montessori method has, at its core, a belief that children are natural learners and that learning therefore should be more child- rather than knowledge-centric than traditional approaches. Google appears to want to make rote … Continue reading Book review: Curious