We had some rain here over the weekend. Here is what was reported in yesterday’s Australian Financial Review (emphasis added): Heavy rains fell across NSW and south-east Queensland over the weekend, which flooded homes and roads, brought down trees and caused motor accidents. But in good news for Sydney, 115 millimetres of rain fell across […]
I was at the mall yesterday eating lunch, and I took a moment to listen to the conversations going on around me. They were, without exception, utterly banal. Consequently, I concluded that conversation is a useless tool, and the widespread use of it is nothing more than a symptom of the widespread decline of intellectual […]
How do we deal with complexity? A while ago I suggested that one strategy that we use to handle complexity is that we outsource some of the rote memorisation of facts and routines that we need regularly. This is essentially the strategy that Atul Gawande also advocates in his outstanding book The Checklist Manifesto: How […]
Here’s a fairly radical idea: if the problem with economic development is that many poorly developed countries have poor institutions, maybe instead of trying to improve their institutions it makes more sense to move the people that live there to a place with better institutions. Let’s break that down a bit. There is a line […]
The fundamental point that I was trying to make in yesterday’s post is that most of us are facing the same innovation problem: it is extremely difficult to get new ideas to spread within most organisations. We are a bit deceived because we hear about innovation at Google, and 3M, and Apple, and we think […]
Today was one of those days when a lot of related ideas just seemed to keep popping up. It started when I read today’s post by George Siemens which discusses the difficulties of changing the educational system. I recommend reading the whole post, but here is part of his argument: I want to resist the […]
With all the feverish discussion and prognostication about Apple’s preview of the iPad, I want to be the first person online to make this prediction: I have absolutely no idea how the iPad will perform. I’ll go one step further – neither does anyone else. The benefit of making predictions right now is that if […]
There was a bit of interest in the blog piece that I did on responding to change so I thought I would follow this up with a quick discussion of a really good model for understanding inertia and how resistance to innovation develops. One of my favorite research studies on excellence and inertia is by […]
Everything is different now that we’re all knowledge workers, right? The digital world has changed everything… hive mind… singularity… chaos! change! panic! PANIC! Maybe. Maybe not. Yesterday I talked about the risks and rewards of low-tech innovation – if we re-think the most basic parts of our value networks, the parts that we take for […]
