Sharing our thinking in the open helps connect with others trying to advance the future of digital working. Our archive of articles and links is open and available below.
Will AI Deliver the Productivity Boost we all Hope For?
Benchmarking against the Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution was a defining moment in human history which marked a monumental shift from manual labour to mechanised production. Yet, the productivity increase was initially only about 3% per decade between...
Accelerating Towards a Future-Fit HR
At a recent event in London for CHROs, HR professionals highlighted the speed of their own function’s transformation as a key challenge. Not keeping pace with the wider organisation’s change agenda means lots of change fronts opening up simultaneously, hampering the...
Crossing the chasm: how will we get from coaching apps to sentient organisations?
The OpenAI Dev day seems to have been a genuinely important milestone in the current wave of AI innovation and exploration - see the Verge’s coverage here - offering three major enhancements to previous functionality: GPT-4 Turbo with a 128k context window, which...
Bridging the Exponential Gap Will Need Dynamic, Transformative Structures, not just AI Magic
If only 7% of organisations are dynamic, we need to focus on creating more transformative structures rather than just sprinkle AI onto existing systems. We are living through weird times in business and geo-politics, and it is hard to watch long-lived...
A New Frontier for Private Equity: Digital Transformation Accelerators
Adjusting Sails: PE Firms After the End of Cheap Money The era of cheap money that allowed Private Equity (PE) firms to acquire assets by leveraging cheap borrowing appears to be over. Jared Gross analyses the challenges and considerations for private equity...
Short and long teeth in cross-functional teams
Organisations need more and better cross-functional teams with varied experiences and skillsets to tackle the complex problems they face today. But whilst they can be a powerful resource when they are working well, some research suggests that 75% of cross-functional...
Avoiding the Upskilling Whack-a-Mole
Employees trying to up-skill face a real dilemma, one which becomes even more acute when their organisation is undergoing transformation: on one hand, they are caught in the prevailing cult of bare minimum learning, and on the other, the organisation’s ever-changing...
Musing on DAOs, Cybernetic control systems and non-hierarchical structures
We are already seeing the decline of hierarchy as an organising principle for leadership in large organisations, and we have increasing evidence, such as this from Leandro Herrero, that positional authority is far less powerful than networked influence as a way to get...
Principles and Patterns over Dogma and Rules
Cerys explores ways to help non-tech teams embrace agile in ways that suit their needs, rather than pursuing a one-size-fits-all framework approach.
Overcoming Hidden Obstacles in Transforming Bank Operations
As the COO of a new bank-owned fintech, my first task was to set up the new company's operations to support users on our app and our network of partner merchants. Our goal was to deliver a superior customer experience through intelligent capabilities like...
Getting lost in the organisational cave
Organisations generate rules and guidelines to govern behaviour and to avoid problematic outcomes, but over time these rules can chip away at the sense of ownership, autonomy and accountability that we want to see in a modern workplace. Getting the balance right is...
The Antidote to the Anti-Social Enterprise
Last week, Meta launched its anticipated Threads platform, a Twitter-esque experience, linked to your Instagram account. Ever an early adopter of social media, I signed up, and immediately got a wave of nostalgia from 15 years ago joining Twitter for the first time....