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.
Cracking the Code: Systems, Not Processes in Operations
A couple of years ago, in a fast-growing convenience retail company, I took on a new responsibility - operations. As a newly-appointed Operations Director, I was overwhelmed with the details of how individual processes work, urgent high-risk escalations, and expert...
Continuous Improvement: The big juggle
A common fallacy in team working is the assumption that productivity and continuous improvement are strongly correlated, meaning that when one improves so does the other. In fact, we need to juggle both at the same time, and that means paying attention to the subtle...
Learning, More than One Way
Cerys explores different learning strategies that can enhance the effectiveness of your personal learning system. It is great that employees are increasingly being encouraged to shape their own learning and career development. But for those employees suddenly finding...
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Lee considers the debate around AGI, AI as a platform and the immense potential of modular operations + AI to improve the way we build and manage organisations Making Brains vs Connecting Brains My co-founder Livio and I used to share an apartment in London in the...
Developing Long-Term Workforce Capabilities is Better Than Boom & Bust Hiring/Firing
Thousands of employees have recently been ‘let go’ from some of the biggest tech companies in the world, as evidenced by sites like layoffs.fyi. Why is that? Many of the big players have released statements citing over-hiring during lockdown, when e-commerce surged,...
Organisational Radical Candor FTW
Cerys explores missed opportunities for radical, two-way discussions L&D are avoiding in their quest for simple, KPI-friendly projects. It is both a cliché and a truism that change is hard and that it never ends. And whilst trying to make employees feel safe,...
Organisational Evolution & the Power of Competitive Ecosystems
5 perspectives on how to harness the power of evolution within competitive environments to improve our organisations.
The cult of bare minimum learning
The past few years have seen an increasing investment in solving the growing digital skills gap within organisations. There are pockets of employees, even in leadership, who adopt learned helplessness with a chuckle - as if it is OK to lead in the digital age without...
Let’s (Not) Make Bots In Our Own Image
Approximation & Interpolation It is impossible to ignore the wave of excitement, hype and alarm that the launch of ChatGPT - and its recent adoption by Microsoft as an enhancement to its Bing search engine - has created in the past couple of weeks. Co-founder Sam...
Fail, Learn and Repeat. Or not really?
Should we always encourage failure-as-learning, and when might this risk de-motivate individual contributors, asks Sebastian Kowalski in this Link*Log Learning by iterating is not the same as accepting overall failure At this point, most team leads have been told many...
Is email to blame for what is wrong with office communication?
Or are Meetings? Or Slack messages? Or Teams Channels? Or, maybe it's simply us... ‘This meeting could have been an email!’ How many of us have uttered these words under our breath, sat in yet another pointless meeting? Meetings like these waste so much time, and...
Little Helper, not Big Brother
Amid the AI hype and fear-mongering, there is value today in creating augmentative little helpers in the workplace, rather than trying to simply replace people. We make our tools, and our tools destroy us in a robot uprising make us Amid reports of ChatGPT being used...