It is well known that elephants cannot dance. It is less well known why that is. Helpfully, this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures have thrown some light on the subject. Essentially, elephants have big fat legs because as size doubles, mass cubes, so proportionately fatter legs are needed. Mark Miodownik, the lecturer, demonstrated the effect [...]
Every person and every organisation has some form of reality distortion field. Some are more severe than others, and according to Stephen Toulouse, Microsoft has a particularly severe version of the problem: The Redmond Reality Distortion Field: The field that influences Microsoft employees and product designers to make wildly incorrect assumptions on the use of [...]
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 [...]
I have written a couple of times about the gap I see between the brilliance of hack days, as exemplified by Rewired State, and the need to build customer needs and user experience into the mix: These projects can get off to a great start using their originators as their own use case, but they [...]
People set themselves curious challenges. Doogie Hooner’s is to explain everything through flowcharts, and his book doing precisely that is published today. One of the tasks he sets himself is to explain the internet to a nineteenth century street urchin. A small extract from the resulting flow chart is shown below, click on it to [...]
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 (quoted by Zoe Williams in the Guardian)
Chance favours the connected mind. Steven Johnson
The next sentence is the most uninspiring opening line you will ever read – which is why I have put this one in front of it. This morning on my way to work I got some money out of a cash machine. I have no idea how many times I have done that before – [...]
I am on a train, going to a meeting about using the next generation of technology in the workplace to improve the effectiveness with which we do business. Next generation in this case means the generation after Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6, so I am containing my excitement, but there is no doubt that [...]
The end of history will come not when nothing more ever changes, but when nobody can work out what has actually happened. We may be closer to that point than we like to think. In the world of organisations, historically, the creation of records was a by-product of actually doing the work. It wasn’t hard [...]