This page brings together all the aphorisms posted on the blog since the series started, rather accidentally, in 2009.
Aphorists’ names are linked to the original source. In some cases, the attribution in the original post gives more details of the source or of the route by which I came across it. Those original posts are linked from the numbers in the first column.
The table can be sorted by any column, which is a bit pointless, except perhaps for the aphorist column which makes it possible to see the collected oeuvre of a particular person
No. | Aphorism | Aphorist |
---|---|---|
1 | Strategy by the crowd may not always be strategic. | Jon Pratty |
2 | Designing user interfaces is almost always harder than it looks. Designing the user interface of government is an enormous challenge, but getting it right can yield enormous benefits. | Ed Felten |
3 | This time next year, it will be difficult to tell the difference between a website and a mobile application. | Premasagar Rose, quoting an unnamed participant at Over the Air |
4 | The better he thinks your ideas are, the more viciously he will criticize them - but that is a sign of respect, not of contempt. | Brad DeLong |
5 | Innovators are disobedient, especially in government. | Andrea di Maio |
6 | It appears to be a permanent part of the human condition that long term deadlines without short term milestones are rarely met. | Joel Spolsky |
7 | The more you think things through first from someone else’s perspective, the simpler the solution you create will be. It is understanding the complexity of a problem that creates a simple solution not technology. Technology is just another crutch of “lets do something” providing options to solving problems, that don’t need solving. These problems would be better solved through the simple power of thought. | Markus Smet |
8 | It looks like a simple and clever solution. But in UI design, very often familiar beats clever. | Stefano Attardi |
9 | The Web is not free. It charges customers their time. Successful websites deliver the most value for the least time. | Gerry McGovern |
10 | There are very serious reasons behind many of the projects I’m working on at the moment, but this gravity doesn’t preclude the use of a little panache or showmanship to add to the effectiveness of the end product. Indeed, in many cases it’s the lack of style that’s been the problem in the first place. It’s hard to be dashing through the medium of SharePoint. Derring isn’t done with Lotus Notes | Ben Hammersley |
11 | Sixteen-hundred Pennsylvania Avenue might get the bulk of the press, but it's in the extremities of government where much of what shapes the lives of citizens takes place. | Nancy Scola |
12 | Innovation requires failure. | Sarah Drummond |
13 | Organisations cannot learn not to be surprised by the future. They can learn not to be surprised that they are surprised by the future. | Ian Livingston |
14 | I totally respect the need for caution and propriety, after all I was a civil servant, but you can’t on the one hand champion social media in government and on the other seek to manage and control the agenda. It just cannot work, and it won’t. | Jeremy Gould |
16 | Listening looks easy, but it’s not simple. Every head is a world. | Lauren Currie |
17 | A digital citizenry isn't interested in talking to an analogue government | David Eaves |
18 | Try as we might, we just couldn't make a mortgage application fun, so we made it simple instead | ING tube advert |
19 | Data is the plankton of the new economy. It seems plentiful, tiny, and insignificant but whole ecosystems of companies, large and small, are emerging to feed off of it. | David Eaves |
20 | Bureaucracies temporarily reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one. | Clay Shirky |
21 | Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose that our views of science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete, and that there are no new worlds to conquer. | Humphry Davy |
22 | Why do free social networks tilt inevitably toward user exploitation? Because you're not their customer, you're their product. So, solve social-networking's malign tilt by paying for it – demand they monetize your happiness, not your exploitation. | Tim Spalding |
23 | Your first design may seem like a solution but it is usually just an early definition of the problem you are trying to solve from. | Luke Wroblewski |
24 | Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. | Clay Shirky |
25 | It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! | Upton Sinclair |
26 | In every organization, there is at least one awesome idea that can upset the status quo. The challenge is finding it - and freeing it. | Umair Haque |
27 | Responses to information are inseparable from their interests, desires, resources, cognitive capacities, and social contexts. Owing to these and other factors, people may ignore information, or misunderstand it, or misuse it. Whether and how new information is used to further public objectives depends upon its incorporation into complex chains of comprehension, action, and response. | Archon Fung, Mary Graham, and David Weil |
28 | Social media spells the end of communicative discretion. This may be a good thing. | Charlie Beckett |
29 | Data is good at asking questions, but rarely gives clear answers. | Simon Dickson |
30 | Societal impact doesn't come from the latest trendy technologies but from mass adoption of unfashionable ones. | William Perrin |
31 | "Best practices" are - by definition - not innovative. | Mark Drapeau |
32 | The biggest mistake is to think you know what the best use for your data is, and lock the data away. | Nigel Shadbolt |
33 | Central units excel at producing coherent strategies that departments then don't implement. | William Perrin |
34.1 | We go to the Net to ask a question and end up making friends. | David Weinberger |
34.2 | Telephones were invented for speaking, and cars were invented for driving, but the Internet was not invented for any single use. That is the source of its value, and certainly of its economic value. It’s why we need to preserve Net neutrality. It’s also why the Net does not fit into any frame perfectly. | David Weinberger |
35 | The trouble with best practices is that they worked yesterday | Jean Russell |
36 | Chance favours the connected mind. | Steven Johnson |
37 | The most important thing to remember about the virtual world is that it is actually very real. | Catherine Howe |
38 | Medicines have to be trialled, before they go on the market, and most fail. In public policy, most ideas have never been tested and trialled, so when they fail, it's on the largest possible canvas. | Geoff Mulgan |
39 | Even if people are technologically available, it doesn’t mean they are behaviorally available. | Helge Tennø |
40 | The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies, frequent coffee houses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. | Steven Johnson |
41 | Thinking of computer security in terms of war is a mistake, public health is closer to the right way to look at this problem | Glyn Wintle |
42 | Government is a fascinating study in unintended consequences. | Steph Gray |
43.1 | Having a strategy is the easy bit, it's making it work that's difficult. | Bruce Thompson |
43.2 | If you think formulating strategy is the hard part, you haven't tried delivering it | Jon Ayre |
44 | If people feel atomised, no amount of technology will make them engaged. | Nick Temple |
45 | All models are wrong but some are useful. | George Box |
46 | The divide isn't digital. | Joanne Jacobs |
47 | Real understanding lies in finding simplifications that bring order to disparate facts | John Kay |
48 | When it comes to innovation, the customer is rarely right. At least, they’re rarely right about what they want next. | Paul Valerio |
49 | One of the myths of command and control is that those who issue commands believe they have control. | Stephen Parry |
50 | Be wrong as fast as you can. | Andrew Stanton |
51 | [Large companies] fear disruption far more than they do destruction. They push the decision to innovate back because things are OK today. | George Buckley |
52 | That’s the problem with being trained to see both sides of an argument, you can see both sides of the argument. | Penny Neu |
53 | If it needs a sign, it's badly designed. | Don Norman |
54 | Nudge is not enough to change behaviour on its own. Sometimes you need to bribe and threaten people too. | Flip Chart Rick |
55 | Archimedes had taken baths before. | Alistair Croll |
56 | This is the futurist's dilemma: Any believable prediction will be wrong. Any correct prediction will be unbelievable. Either way, a futurist can't win. He is either dismissed or wrong. | Kevin Kelly |
57 | When the data seem to point to an unexpected finding, always consider the possibility that the problem is a feature of the data, rather than a feature of the world … When I discover something surprising in data, the most common explanation is that I made a mistake. | John Kay |
58 | I hereby declare, "arguments not aphorisms" to be my new aphorism (not argument). | Tom Coates |
59 | It's not iterative if you only do it once | Paul Hammond |
60 | You can't institutionalize innovation. If you could, everyone would do it. | Carl Bass |
61 | Two elements of successful leadership: a willingness to be wrong and an eagerness to admit it. | Seth Godin |
62 | What looks from an adult perspective like radical technological change is just the background radiation of a young person’s life. | Martin Belam |
63 | In a pluralist and open society we have to tolerate many things that we dislike or find offensive, if no for other reason than because the alternative – suppressing them – is worse. | Francis FitzGibbon |
64 | The creation of simplicity is a complex process. | Sarah Lay |
65 | If everyone thinks you have a good idea, you're too late. | Paul Cheng |
66 | [Brains] are social-monitoring devices much more than calculators. | Mark Earls |
67 | Sometimes the best hack has no coding at all. | Hadley Beeman |
68 | The problem with living through a revolution is that you've no idea how things will turn out. | John Naughton |
69 | Things only become possible after you are bored to death of talking about them. | Ben Goldacre |
70 | Nudge isn’t always enough. Sometimes you need a big stick too. | Flip Chart Rick |
71 | I've never seen a situation where a large company's problem was too much internal cooperation. | Jeremy Leader |
72 | If I want to have a thought of mine preserved for eternity, I put it on my blog; if I don’t care if I ever see it again, I put it on Twitter. | John Scalzi |
73 | The controversy machine is bigger than the reality machine. | Michael Lewis |
74 | The principal binary, political conflict of the 20th century was left versus right. In the 21st century, it is open versus closed. | Alec Ross |
75 | If something makes sense within the organisation but sounds mad outside it, then that's a good sign that something might be wrong with the culture. | Ian Leslie |
76 | Assume nobody else has any idea what they're doing either. | Aaron Swartz |
77 | You can't regulate for bad incentives. | Indy Johar |
78 | Unpolished designs have never stopped good products from succeeding, but it doesn't mean that good products should remain unpolished. | Dmitry Fadeyev |
79 | If it’s got a Change Management Board, it means it isn’t changing. | Anthony Zacharzewski |
80 | She thinks she is leading the way, but actually she's just going in front. | Overheard, context unknown |
81 | Writing is a form of processing my ideas. | Dave Winer |
82 | No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it. | Alan Cooper |
83 | The most prominent predictors of the future tend to be the most wrong | Geoff Mulgan |
84 | When it's your job to see things, it's amazing just how much you see. | Paul Clarke |
85 | A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight. | Daniel Kahneman |
86 | You learn nothing new by getting something right. | Richard Gerver |
87 | Good interface design isn’t about making the interface invisible. It’s about integrating it so it’s obvious | Andrew Curry |
88 | No one ever wants backups, but everyone always wants restores. | Bruce Schneier |
89 | The future is not out there like some foggy day, pre-existing and waiting to be revealed once the mist lifts. Instead, I now like to think of it more as a lump of clay – it has the potential of being fashioned into a fine sculpture but, equally, it could end up an unstructured mess. | Richard Susskind |
90 | The demand for bad products can be inelastic with respect to failure. | Chris Dillow |
91 | The thing about trust is that it doesn’t emerge, full grown, from the beginning. It grows and it feeds off failure. People learn how to trust not because there are guidelines but because they interact with other people and do it better each time. | Martin Stewart-Weeks |
92 | When you read about anything you know about in the newspaper, it's always wrong. | Dave Birch |
93 | There is a difference – often elided – between a probability and a degree of confidence in a forecast. It is one reason why we are better at avoiding drizzle than financial crises. | John Kay |
94 | The web is much better at making information free than making it expensive. | Matthew Butterick |
95 | It is the nature of radical new technologies that to anticipate them is to be a long way along the road to inventing them. | John Kay |
96 | As ever, design systems for the things that will go wrong, not the things you expect to go right. | Paul Clarke |
97 | The idea that people would agree with us if only they were more intelligent owes more to self-love than to serious thought. | Chris Dillow |
98 | Customers are ruthlessly horizontal. | Joel Bailey |
99 | It is time to move from circulating documents to visiting texts. | Mark Foden |
100.1 | You will be misunderstood. | Seth Godin |
100.2 | Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent. | Ludwig Wittgenstein, |
101 | Fear of mistakes rules out experiment, and when you rule out experiment, you store up failure. | Ian Leslie |
102 | If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the hard stuff (history, economics, philosophy, art, ambiguities, contradictions). Bracketing it off to the side to focus just on technology, or just on innovation, actually prevents transformation. | Benjamin Bratton |
103 | Design is a behaviour, not a department | Origin obscure |
104 | Listening is not the same as waiting to speak. | Penny Walker |
105 | A well-managed hierarchy is among the most effective weapons for getting rid of the friction, incompetence, and politics that plague bad organisations. | Chris Fry |
106 | Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible. | Jacob Bronowski |
107 | The word 'innovate' is overused generally, and misapplied often. | Joanne Jacobs |
108 | Think of a digital strategy as a change programme rather than a technology programme. | Helen Milner |
109 | [Martin Luther King] gave the "I have a dream" speech, not the "I have a plan" speech. | Simon Sinek |
110 | History books tell us as much about the time they were written as the time they were written about. | Tom Streithorst |
111 | If you've made something brilliant and it doesn't explain itself, you've not made something brilliant | Russell Davies |
112 | The most important source of economic advance comes not from doing the same things better, but from achieving the same objective in a completely different way. | John Kay |
113 | No, the truth does not always lie somewhere in the middle | Anne Applebaum |
114 | With hindsight, everyone looks daft. | Chris Dillow |
115 | The unsustainable is never sustained. | Diane Coyle |
116 | If you’re far enough ahead that people can’t figure out if you’re joking, you know you’ve innovated. | Georges Harik |
117 | Life has an atrocious UI | Katie Johnston |
118 | Disruption happens when your customers learn faster than you | Adam Pisoni |
119 | If information doesn’t square with someone’s prior beliefs, he discards the beliefs if they’re weak and discards the information if the beliefs are strong. | Maria Konnikova |
120 | Anyone who has worked in government knows that it is much easier to design policy than to implement it | Larry Summers |
121 | Design is never finished. | Amy Whitney |
122 | The problem with guilt is that it's never the right people who have it. | Kevin Lloyd |
123 | 'Failure demand' is a dry label for mountains of very human misery. | Tom Loosemore |
124 | Technology is an intervention not a solution | Martin Innes |
125 | Just as the industrial age produced a hierarchical, top-down politics in its own image, so a networked knowledge economy requires a distributed, network form of politics and government. | John McTernan |
126 | Sometimes you need to look backwards to realise just how far things have come. | Dafydd Vaughan |
127 | It has been said for many years that when a thing is practical and functional, it is beautiful as well. | Arne Jacobsen |
128 | Teaching kids to code will solve nothing unless you also teach them to think. | Aral Balkan |
129 | Risk cannot, and should not, be avoided. It is inherent to innovation. But it should be managed. | Geoff Mulgan |
130 | If opinions are not based on facts, changing facts will not necessarily change opinions. | John Kay |
131 | There’s no fix for not knowing why you exist | Dave Briggs |
132 | When you start from a position of technology, involve lots of people who know lots more about technology, you get something that inevitably resembles technology. | Carl Haggerty |
133 | Startups drive change to stay alive. Corporates control change to stay alive. This explains everything. | Nat Torkington |
134 | When you hire a user researcher, the domain they should be most expert in is user research. | Leisa Reichelt |
135 | We are very bad at not blaming anything. | Hank Green |
136 | The problem with only trying to solve serious problems is that the future generally arrives looking like a toy. | Benedict Evans |
137 | The right product isn't the best idea. The right product is the one that works within the complexity of the system. | Dominic Campbell |
138 | The currency of leadership is the future. | Tom Fletcher |
139 | Don’t fall in love with your first idea. | Leisa Reichelt |
140 | Good design costs the same as bad design, it's just that bad design costs way more in the long run | Andrea Siodmok |
141 | Design is always and inevitably collaborative | Andrea Siodmok |
142 | The question you start with is always rubbish. Whatever it is, it's always wrong, whoever you are and whenever you ask it. | Andrea Siodmok |
143 | Every detail added to a claim makes it less probable. | Chris Hallquist |
144 | There's nothing like being on the receiving end to see exactly what citizens go through. | Lorna Campbell |
145 | Technology is the enabler that causes the good things to happen and work better. Like data, its a resource and a means, not an end | Lucy Knight |
146 | The most difficult, and interesting, issues are not when one side is wrong and one side is right. They are when both sides are right. | Marc Andreessen |
147 | Data isn’t fissile material. It doesn’t spontaneously reach critical mass and start producing insights. | Marko Karppinen |
148 | It's easy to work out what needs to be done. To be valuable you need to be able to work out how to do it. | Jon Ayre |
149 | Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point. | Eliezer Yudkowsky |
150 | To write aphorisms is to assume a mask – a mask of scorn, of superiority. | Susan Sontag |
151 | The biggest disruptor is the customer | Nicola Millard |
152 | The problem with most best practice is it's just practice with the word "best" in front of it. | Jon Ayre |
153 | All curation grows until it requires search. All search grows until it requires curation. | Benedict Evans |
154 | The politics of technology is politics, but it’s never just politics. | Zeynep Tufekci |
155 | Making digital work in government will mostly involve things that have nothing to do with technology. | Emily Andrews |
156 | The only way anybody ever learns to write well is by trying to write well. This usually begins by reading good writing by other people, and writing very badly by yourself, for a long time. | Ursula LeGuin |
157 | Free speech is a complex molecule. You can’t just pile up individual atoms of free speech and hope they’ll crystallize into it. | Abi Sutherland |
158 | The belief that there always solutions to problems is the curse of the modern age. | David Allen Green |
159 | Denial is mainly about fear, the fear of knowing and the fear of not knowing. | Mark O'Neill |
160 | Democracy is the form of society devised and maintained by those who know they don’t know everything. | Albert Camus (attrib) |
161 | Big bureaucracies will tend to resolve any ambiguity in favour of continuity. | Stephen Gill |
162 | Whatever you are making, someone will have done it before, using the tools and thinking of their time. | Richard Pope |
163 | No truth is undeniable, no matter how simple. | Anthony Zacharzewski |
164 | IT systems are just hardcoded processes. If the processes are old school non-intuitive the systems will be. | Hilary Ellary |
165 | Go where you are rare | Megan Smith |
166 | In a trial-and-error world, the one who can find errors the fastest wins. | Yevgeniy Brikman |
167 | You can either iterate before you fail, or you can do it after you fail, but you'll do it either way. | David Eaves |
168 | We start from what people want to say, not from what organisations want to ask. | James Munro |
169 | In tech, "never" means 5-10 years, but "5-10 years" means never. | Benedict Evans |
170 | There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all. | Peter Drucker |
171 | You’re not asking the users to be creative on your behalf, your job is to be inspired by their lives and their situation. | Tim Brown |
172 | Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. | John Maynard Keynes |
173 | Don't have a digital strategy, execute your strategy digitally | Jørgen vig Knudstorp |