Today would have been my grandfather Robert’s 104th birthday. It also marks four years since I leapt out into the venture that I describe as Stamp. Four years on, and what have I learned so far? Well, the first thing is that in that 48 months I’ve been able to cultivate a really diverse set … Continue reading Bertie Day 2017
This week I have learned: I might have a few new clients. Hooray! (More the merrier) I'm really interested in the idea that Service Design might be applied to design change approaches for organisations adopting technology. It's a bit meta, but meta is good... This iPad Pro thing I've been using this week is really … Continue reading Weeknote 345: that’s quite a large number of weeks
What is it about corporate culture that wants to redefine anything personal as things inanimate? From Personnel to Human Resources to, now, "talent"... In a brief Twitter exchange with Simon Heath this morning it clicked for me why I have such a problem with the term. For the years that I have worked in media, … Continue reading They’re people, not talent
Yesterday marked the formal start of user research in the latest project, a business change programme to help the people in a government body to take advantage of new cloud-based collaborative technologies.There's a lot that has been done in the UK public sector over the past seven years to instil agile approaches into the way … Continue reading Change as an design challenge
Someone somewhere in Silicon Valley right now... Yeah, so like, what we wanted to do was to reinvent the brake. There's just too much friction invoked with brakes. Users don't want friction. They want frictionless. They crave frictionless. So we took the friction out of brakes. These are brakes re-invented. Stopping 2.0. Because, like, who … Continue reading The importance of friction
This week I have learned: Some small businesses are being diddled by "cloud" providers providing sub-standard private hosting... ... but illusions of control hold them back from plunging fully cloudward. It's great to have a conversation with people who really understand the value in robust data modelling. Those people are very rarely self-identified Data Scientists. … Continue reading Weeknote 344: the power of gathering
We'd like to do something really innovate. Can you show us how you've done that before? If I had a pound for every time that I'd heard that from clients, prospects and elsewhere over the last few years, then I'd be a richer man. Well, at least a couple of months of Amazon Prime subscription-richer. As … Continue reading The power of people
This week I have learned: That is perfectly possible to say goodbye to people without religion getting in the way. Farewell Great Aunt Joyce. Your wicked giggle will stay with me forever. Big management consulting firms are war. In the Edwin Starr sense of the term. Openness is key to innovation. Open innovation programmes aren't … Continue reading Weeknote 343: fond farewell
A fascinating evening last night at the Hidden Edge Club's networking event at the rather lovely Soho Hotel. The theme - Competing with Digital Natives - and I was honoured to be part of the panel discussion exploring themes around digitization, and how traditional companies can react to competition from pure-play digital businesses (and particularly the big … Continue reading The myths of disruption
A week tomorrow brings the Minimum Viable Workplace workshop in London, a piece of collaboration that started with a conversation with Anne Marie Rattray in the Spring. We've got a dozen or more people from all sorts of organisations and background coming together to discuss and explore the ways in which organisations provide the platforms for … Continue reading Providing platforms for work
