What is the opposite of a Mystery Shopper?

Do public complaints make a difference? I’m always intrigued when people take to Twitter or other social media platforms to complain about a product or service. Firstly I’m wondering, does this actually make a difference? Do things improve? Secondly, if that person is a ‘Big-Wig’ in an organisation, I’m led to thinking… ‘I wonder if […]

Homologation Special! Regulation *can* Drive Innovation.

But, it depends… Whether or not a regulation process (including inspection, audit and any other ‘control’ method you can think of) actually ‘drives’ innovation depends on a lot of things. For me, the biggest influence is ‘purpose’. If your main purpose is to ‘enforce’ compliance with clearly defined rules or standards it could be a […]

Fixing the Bike(shed). A conversation about how to deal with Bikeshedding

Have you ever been in a meeting where you spend an eternity discussing something relatively trivial, and then microseconds on something significant? If the answer is yes, the chances are you’ve been Bikeshedding… Bikeshedding is the common name for Parkinson’s Law of Triviality:  … ‘the amount of time a committee will spend discussing an item […]

Ritual Dissent, Facilitation that Goes Beyond Comfortable Consensus

Ritual Dissent: “We do that here. It’s just that the dissent happens once people have gone back to their desks and they destroy the idea” Anon. Just for the record, what I’m talking about here is: Dissent as a strongly held difference of opinion and Ritual as a set of fixed actions that are part […]

The negative side of autonomous vehicles – no more AA Roadside Recovery Service

I’m not excited about autonomous vehicles. There’s a lot been said about the benefits of the autonomous vehicles that we’ve been promised will arrive in the next few years. On-demand use, energy efficiency, less congestion, improved safety, high reliability etc etc. But I’m not so sure… The ‘reliability thing’ (never breaking down and leaving you […]