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?
Category: Social
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
I've been working with lots of teams in different organisations over the past few years on a question that generally starts along the lines of "We'd like to know how to use Product X", where 'Product X' is one of Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite, Slack or one of many of the dozens of … Continue reading Understanding collaboration through rich pictures
There is a thought experiment that I picked up a year or so ago, and the origins are sadly forgotten. It goes a little something like this: You have found out that the world is in mortal danger. Aliens are coming. They land in 60 minutes. When they land, they will take over the planet … Continue reading The Rumsfeld Paradox
Somewhere in a parallel universe... When we first pitched for the job it felt, to a great extent, like just about any other public sector gig. It paid fine, but there were constraints that we had kind of got used to in how many boundaries we might be able to push. The pitching process was … Continue reading Pushing social boundaries
I had a great hour or so earlier this week listening to Rowland Manthorpe from Wired talking about the future of money at the inaugural The New Normal session. Rather than the a la mode of talking about distributed ledgers and crypto currencies, Rowland focused instead on data - at the core of his argument … Continue reading The future of money
I learned how to write 140 character tweets at the age of 16. I'm nearly 47. Let me explain... Back in the day in Watford, the funny little town in which I grew up, we used to have two local newspapers. The Evening Echo was published six times a week, including the exciting Saturday evening … Continue reading Sweating the small stuff
Out of idle curiosity yesterday I spent a bit of time asking the internet the question "What do I need to know to start exploring the world of Artificial Intelligence?" The answers that I received from those nice Mr Brin & Page's marvellous machine were illuminating. There was a lot about mathematics. Statistics in particular. … Continue reading A limited interpretation
Every so often a small yet simple idea from someone else gets lodged in my brain and changes the way I think about things. So it is with the concept from Sigmund Freud that crossed my path a few months ago: the narcissism of small differences. What Freud observed was that when groups of people … Continue reading Small differences
