Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Cutting back on digital – the gains, and the withdrawal symptoms
I’m trying to wean myself off ubiquitous digital connectivity. Over the last few weeks my trusty iPhone 6 has been running more and more slowly. I took the plunge, backed it up and wiped it over the weekend which cured its sluggish symptoms. But it also allowed me to deal with something I’ve been aware…
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People debt is like technical debt
Software development has the concept of “technical debt”: the cost of the shortcuts you have to take in the interests of time, money or available skill when you’re building a system. Essentially, your software will work for now, but it mightn’t scale to cope with new users, or be as easy to use as it…
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Reddit Place – closer to your organisation than you think?
Something wonderful happened a couple of weekends ago. From “When Pixels Collide“: For April Fool’s Day, Reddit launched a little experiment. It gave its users, who are all anonymous, a blank canvas called Place. The rules were simple. Each user could choose one pixel from 16 colors to place anywhere on the canvas. They could…
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“There are few things more important in the world today than what you are doing here.”
These words greet every visitor to the David Attenborough Building in Cambridge. The people who are based here work for a range of organisations and disciplines, including the University of Cambridge, the RSPB and the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre. They’ve been brought together to understand and preserve ecosystems and biodiversity – under greater threat…
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Every organisation needs a strategy – but what’s a strategy, and how do I develop one?
Every organisation needs a strategy, if it’s to meet its potential. Good luck and keeping your fingers crossed won’t work indefinitely. But what’s a strategy, and how do you develop one? What is a strategy? Strategy is a description of how your organisation will “win”, or prevail, given the circumstances it finds itself in. Unlike a vision…
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Looking from the outside in
I came across a thought-provoking article from Lora Cecere on LinkedIn a few weeks ago. She discusses the downfall of Caterpillar’s CEO Doug Oberhelman, as a result of the dogged pursuit of an unsuccessful strategy, and the lack of adaptability of his company to changing market situations. Sales-driven and marketing-driven processes are internally focused on…
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Truth
In general, the people around us don’t tell us the truth. Leaders don’t get told the truth by those around them. They don’t get told the truth by their bosses and are even less likely to get told the truth by those they manage. They don’t get told the truth about the organization and they…
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Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
The best quote from the worst film in the Star Wars series. At the risk of going the full David Brent, I’d like to offer the following: Trust leads to conflict. Conflict leads to commitment. Commitment leads to accountability. Accountability leads to results. Results are the measures of success of high-performing teams. It may not have the…
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It’s not about you – helping your team to focus on results
Many potentially high-performing teams still lose their way. Trust is high, fierce debate is present, commitment and accountability is well-developed – but when three, six, twelve months have passed, there’s always a reason why they haven’t delivered. The reasons may be understandable; the decisions justified – but given their time again, the team would have…
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Three Steps to Build Accountability
We’ve talked about trust, conflict and commitment. They’re vital ingredients of high-performing teams except… we haven’t actually done any work yet. Following a decision, once work is underway, teams can often be tripped up by a lack of accountability – an unwillingness to hold each other to account for delivery. Accountability can only be built on…
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