It’s been another one of those weeks where I’ve heard a lot about the enormous challenges we face, the need for big changes and big transformations. It all leaves me feeling a bit… meh! It’s all well and good telling people that they need to transform, but how exactly? Do we have the necessary skills? […]
Because, that’s the way we’ve always done things around here…
An expression that is usually followed up with something along the lines of… “is the most dangerous thing you’ll hear”. You may have heard it quoted by serious people or even seen it on posters or painted on the walls of more ‘progressive’ organisations. It’s a powerful statement that has many layers of meaning, but […]
The Life Cycle of a Silver Bullet
“Silver Bullets could actually be called Silver Boomerangs, because they keep coming back…”. A lovely observation from Matt Wyatt which doesn’t need much explanation, and I’ll pick it up again later. It was prompted by the previous post, A lesson from the Lone Ranger on Pascale’e Management Fads and Silver Bullet Syndrome, which led to […]
Cycling to Work, ‘it’s just what we do…’ could Social Practice Theory help?
Why don’t more people cycle? Here’s a small experiment you can try. Introduce ‘what can we do to encourage cycling to work’ into a conversation. Wait and see how long it takes before someone mentions, ‘The Dutch’. Less than 5 mins I’d wager. Depending on which bit of the internet you believe, 25% of all trips […]
Minimum Viable Transformation: Change should be Small and Imperfect
Speeches you never hear at a Corporate Conference: “… Our Transformation Programme is going to be small and imperfect. We are going to do many small things that probably won’t work straight away. However, we will learn lessons from these ‘experiments’ and apply the learning to a better next small thing, making sure we progressively move […]
Duck or Rabbit, the Evidence! (based on perception and bias)
Can you see the Rabbit and the Duck? Try turning the screen through 90 degrees – then back again. Right, fun over, back to the serious stuff. Hands up if you hear this phrase, chanted out at just about every meeting you attend nowadays. It’s a new mantra that started creeping into widespread use about […]
Friends Don’t Let Friends Have Rubbish Meetings. Peer Pressure to ‘Do The Right Thing’
Friends don’t let Friends …. Knit Drunk. Sorry to start a post with such a disturbing image. It all started with a schooner of sweet sherry, now just look at those loose stitches, and the wool colours. All so preventable and very wrong. Sometimes it is necessary to share startling graphic images to highlight the consequences […]
Choice Architecture; how to avoid being a ‘Meeting Lemming’
This post follows the one I wrote about meetings being a virus that use human hosts to reproduce. Paul Taylor rightly questioned; ‘we know meetings are a problem, but why are we unable to do anything about them?’. Ultimately there’s something strange going on with meeting attendance; people cannot, or do not want to, change their […]
What's the PONT 