For many years I've held true to a concept that goes as follows: You can exponentially scale transactions. You can change interactions into transactions and then exponentially scale those transactions, but you lose social and cultural meaning along the way. You cannot exponentially scale interactions. They only scale in a linear fashion. My go-to metaphor … Continue reading Simulating interactions
Category: Social
Last week I spent a bit of time with some of my Executive colleagues thinking about the way in which we understand and foster relationships with people who work for our clients. Our business, like many in the professional services space, depends on relationships between people. The ways in which we establish, foster and maintain … Continue reading Tracking client relations
Do you remember when the fax machine ended? No? No, neither do I. I remember having to scrabble around with a PC that still had a modem in it back in around 2011 to send a fax as part of a mortgage application. I remember around the same time receiving someone else's details in a … Continue reading The end of phone
I'm the sort of person who has favourite Laws of Social Science. Don't judge me. The two "Laws" (let's be honest, they're rules of thumb) are Goodhart's Law and Campbell's Law. The first, Goodhart's Law, is best described in paraphrase from Marilyn Strathem:When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. … Continue reading Goodhart, Campbell and Elections
The BBC recently ran a news item describing how an airliner got into difficulties because of a software flaw. On closer examination, it's probably more precise to say that an airline pilot got into difficulties because some people interpret the meaning of the title "Miss" differently to others, but that's not as snappy, and doesn't … Continue reading Data and ethics
In the course of my research for Who Shares Wins, I was told the possibly apocryphal story of how email was introduced into a law firm back in the early 1990s. The senior partners had been sceptical about this new-fangled communications medium, and had resisted its introduction. However a more tech-friendly group of employees started … Continue reading Let them play
A question came up about what makes for a successful online event on one of the many WhatsApp groups of which I'm a member. Here are my thoughts... First off, what's really of value to participants at an event? Maybe for some it's the content, but for many the content is just an excuse to … Continue reading Successful online events
I love simple questions that have complex and nuanced answers. In a conversation with my dad at the weekend, we came up with three that might for the starting point for a deep dialogue with a group of people about how they work together. The first one is one I've used a fair bit already, … Continue reading What three questions?
A couple of weeks ago I was running an event for the technology leadership team of a pharmaceutical company. The team is geographically dispersed across the planet, and one of the things that become clear from our conversations was that they were missing informal contact and conversation. As is often the way when teams are … Continue reading The #globalcanteen
Anyone who regularly delivers workshops or presentations will know the massive impact that the layout of a room will have on the session. An audience laid out in the lines of a theatre auditorium will be in receive mode. Put them around tables in "Cabaret" style and they'll talk to one another more readily. Put … Continue reading Virtual rooms
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