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Strategy, Architecture & Problem-Solving

That Pedal Show

Examples of Innovation in The Musical Instrument Industry

I’ve embedded a video below of an interview on That Pedal Show with Tore from TC Electronic. The video includes several good examples of some parts of the corporation innovation process at TC Electronic. What I like about the video is that it’s a natural conversation. It’s not a presentation of how they’ve innovated, or…
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conference-room

What’s in a Role Name?

How many people do you have in your organisation that produce the product for the customer and how many manage those people? We assume more people doing and fewer managing within an extended enterprise (allowing for counting those in outsourced functions). Background I was trying to find a new contact in a well-known company. One…
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Post-it Notes

Confirmation bias in design thinking

Every few years another fad comes around. Look back long enough and you’ll see lean, systems thinking, TQM, CRM, structured systems and many, many more methodologies and/or approaches. The problem is in the delivery of the projects when the terms become more widespread. Background What we’re seeing is the climb of two methodologies: Service Design and Design…
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calendar

How a Simple Change Can Bring Multiple Benefits

I’m often designing change programmes for large organisations. I’m an external consultant, an outsider coming into the organisation that already exists. There are already governance boards in place, whether for operational, financial or change governance. These boards happen on a regular basis, often on a set day of the month. As an outsider, I’m not…
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Lean Canvas

How the Lean Canvas Promotes the Sharing of Innovation Ideas

I had the great opportunity to see how different organisations approach short-scale corporate innovation, at the NWG Festival of Innovation (#NWGInnovationFestival) earlier this month. The Festival was set-up to resemble a summer festival, complete with the action happening in temporary tents around the racecourse. There were several different design sprints each in their own tent…
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Ladder of citizen participation

Where Organisations Go Wrong

A lot happened in 1969. The moon landing, Led Zeppelin was released (the first LZ album), the maiden flight of the Boeing 747, and a paper by Sherry Arnstein. It’s difficult to say which is the most important of those above, but Arnstein’s paper is probably the least famous. Context I frequently speak with directors…
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Shhh!

Is this a bad time to talk?

There are times to make people feel comfortable, to help them feel that the change is achievable. There are also times when we need to remove that comfort and destabilise temporarily, so that they can work towards a solution. We commonly reintroduce comfort, or better still guide the audience towards discovering the own new level…
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Considerations for the platform of a new startup

Background I’m seriously considering building my new startup on Microsoft’s Azure platform with the BizSpark programme and that’s a departure for me. I’m going to use the term “startup” loosely but at least 1 of the 3 conformed to Steve Blank’s definition, proving the business model worked. I’ll cover three of the ideas; 2 built…
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Automation of White Collar Jobs and Process Debt

Background Business Insider published an article on how automation may remove the need for people in white-collar roles. While the context of the article seems relevant, I found the choice of example to be very odd. Specifically Deliveroo’s creation of 25 redundancies in their ordering process. In fact, I think it more likely that process debt had…
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Applying Different Categories of Knowledge

Introduction We should be careful when we judge the effectiveness of others and reflecting on this can in turn help influence us in how we approach change activities. I’ll use this chart (shown in more detail further down) to describe the differences. First Day Effectiveness On numerous occasions, I’ve seen people judge others by their effectiveness on the first day at…
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