On last week's WB40, Chris and I spent some time dissecting the arguments put forward in a fascinating article Survival of the Mediocre Mediocre in which Venkatesh Rao proposes that the thing that humans are really good at is being not quite great at a lot of things, and this is the quality that will hold … Continue reading Mediocrity, consciousness, and competence
Category: Technology
I get great joy from being able to munge together bits of off the shelf technology to be able to create a thing that serves a need. It's probably a result of spending too much time with Lewis Richards over the years... Towards the end of last year I was asked by a client if I … Continue reading VR on the “cheap”
At the end of 2018 I presented at the London Strategic IT Partner forum. Here's what I had to say... https://youtu.be/VXmFQRk4wv8?t=45 Big thanks to Jon Baxter for permission to repost the video.
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
Sometimes my better ideas come from my mildly sarcastic one-liners... A couple of weeks ago I was in a workshop with a group of people when someone said that they were working on a project to promote "Paperless Meetings" within their organisation. "You should be striving for meetingless papers" I quipped. It's been a recurring … Continue reading Meetingless papers
A bit of a "how to" post reflecting on a session I ran yesterday for the technology team from a retail client. The Brief All of my most exciting pieces of work come at short notice. I spoke with the CIO from the client on Tuesday, and he wanted an interactive and fun session to … Continue reading Agile Simulation: Method and Reflections
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
Semiotics isn't something I've heard much about in the two and a half decades in which I've been working in the technology industry. It's a bit woolly for the tech world. But I'm a big believer in how you can understand much about the culture of an organisation through the artefacts that it creates as … Continue reading The cultural assumptions in collaboration software
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
Our world is dominated by ideas of problems and solutions. Of questions and answers. And I'm beginning to wonder if there are cognitive biases at play that prevent us from being able to contend with the complexity that often arises from the answers that are required to solve seemingly simple questions. The trigger for this … Continue reading The Simple Question Fallacy
