Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

Designing digital services that are accountable, understood, and trusted (OSCON 2016 talk)
Questions of accountability, understanding and trust are only going to become louder.

These issues are only going to get harder to solve as we ask users for more data and to trust code to make decisions for them.

The organisations that understand this and start thinking about how to make services that are accountable, understandable and trusted will have the advantage.

Technology Won’t Kill Meetings — But We Can – The Future of Work by shapingwork – Medium
We thought the world of work was to be reimagined. The death of the office. The end of email. A utopia of work/life integration fueled by work-where-you-want technology.

The blurring between Design Thinking and Agile – Front Line Interaction Design – Medium
The Agile Manifesto embraces this notion of perpetual beta and that software should be developed with a continuous loop of customer needs going in and ‘good enough’ software coming out.

This state of continuous refinement is ultimately the same as design’s process of jumping backward and forward. The only difference is that with design we stay in this state for the duration of the project, whereas in Agile we stay in this state for the lifetime of the software.

Need a strategy? Let it grow like a weed in the garden | Henry Mintzberg
Strategies grow initially like weeds in a garden; they are not cultivated like tomatoes in a hothouse. In other words, the process of creating strategies can be over-managed. Sometimes it is more important to let ideas emerge than to force a premature consistency on the organization. Allow those strategies to form, as patterns, not having to be formulated, as plans. The hothouse, if needed, can come later.

Science fiction about AI never seems to talk about the interesting stuff, tax and geography and… – Medium
We’re past the point where we can pull the plug either physically, technologically or societally around AI and automation of the workforce, or would want to. Humankind augmented by AI can achieve so much. It’s time to get serious about the financial and societal implications. The whimsical notion of the legality of a robot being able to make money from their actions in Bicentennial Man are long gone. It’s time to understand how to reform an economy where human labour becomes a less valuable commodity and taxable personal income is a scarcity.

Technology doesn’t shape the future | mmitII
More of us who aren’t geeks need to engage with and be involved with the creation technology. It’s no longer enough to stand on the sidelines complaining that it’s all too complicated to understand. Here’s a secret: whilst some of the technologies we use today are quite complicated, much of it is really quite simple, just rather dull and tedious.

But this shouldn’t any longer be about “us” and “them”. I’ve spent most of my career as an outside in the world of technology, trying in my own little ways to show that the success of software depends on much more than the software. It’s about culture and behaviour and politics and Politics and psychology and sociology and art and design and passion and belief and luck and timing and storytelling and truth. And probably a few more things besides.

A Minimum Viable Product Is Not a Product, It’s a Process · The Macro
When you build a product, you make many assumptions. You assume you know what users are looking for, how the design should work, what marketing strategy to use, what architecture will work most efficiently, which monetization strategy will make it sustainable, and which laws and regulations you have to comply with. No matter how good you are, some of your assumptions will be wrong. The problem is, you don’t know which ones.

Is Whitehall’s obsession with business cases getting in the way of delivery? | Civil Service World
Business case development is really just as fickle as the conviction-led era that preceded them. It is just a good deal slower, and concealed in a veneer of numbers and buzzwords. Business cases are astrology, not astronomy.

That is because at their heart, business cases are crystal ball gazing with Excel tables. Experience has shown that there is no better way to guarantee poor predictions than to use individual experts to make assumptions about the future, and sprinkle on a little cognitive bias. Yet this is exactly how we still cost up all the biggest public sector investments.

When You Change the World and No One Notices – Collaborative Fund
Big breakthroughs typically follow a seven-step path:

First, no one’s heard of you.Then they’ve heard of you but think you’re nuts.Then they understand your product, but think it has no opportunity.
Then they view your product as a toy.Then they see it as an amazing toy.Then they start using it.Then they couldn’t imagine life without it.

This process can take decades. It rarely takes less than several years.