Good short history: "design thinking ... has spread from products to services to just about anything in business... often used as shorthand for a magic potion approach to innovation and creative problem solving... end up being a theatrical thing that people can point to and say, ‘oh we did that.’ "So it's one example of how "or…

don’t sell products and services to customers, but rather try to help people address their jobs to be done... most of the masses of customer data companies create is structured to show correlations... is taking companies in the wrong direction...home in on ... what the customer hopes to accomplish... the job to be done... When we buy a product, we…

many teams ... have become obsessed with ... being agile ... But agile is not a strategy — it is a capability... cannot permanently affect ... competitive position unless there’s a strategy behind it... constant cycles of optimization... offers little more than diminishing returns... not considering the opportunity costs ... A good idea is not the…

a unique productivity philosophy called deep work. He carefully blocked out his day, and created space for long, uninterrupted hours to write ... tactics like travelling on foot to give himself more time in isolation and actively sought out isolated spaces to work... his latest book, Digital Minimalism... there's an implicit reward for the sha…

... they have recently embarked on a journey to become “Agile.”... neither explicit support nor discouragement from senior executives... they are failing for the same list of reasons as every other team I have met with in the last 5 years. Here are those reasons:... 1. There is no clear vision for the product....The “idea” has been handed down …

“agile” describes so many different work systems that it’s become an almost meaningless term... for IBM “the leaders have to be with the squads [his word for small teams] and the squads have to be in a location.”... Research suggests remote workers are more productive and log more hours than employees who work in the office, and for many companie…

most deployments fall into the ‘deploy and pray’ category, a minority address known pain points and use cases, whilst only about 20% of projects involve a concerted organisation-wide roll-out aimed at creating a connected company. He argued that some kind of paradigm shift is needed to go beyond just adopting social technologies towards creating a…

In response to "The Tyranny of Agile"... Don’t get me wrong — in theory it sounds great to release half-checked, bug-ridden websites for your users to check in the name of agile... But websites delivering actual governmental services really badly IRL can ruin people’s lives...

The solution is in a new method of policy making with strong similarities to the agile approach ... “Policy making will be service design, and the designing of services will be the making of policy. Ideas and their implementation will be so close together... The way the law is made will have to change.

Blog posts take hours to write, those great images need to be found or created and those social networks need to be managed and nurtured. It is often not done or persisted with because there are no apparent quick rewards. This is where the tortoise can beat the hare by slow persistence. It is a marathon and a journey not a sprint... you are bui…

If a 100 new alluring little foxy ideas, insights and observations hit you every week, and can pick out the 1 that is worth responding to, you're a foxhog... the foxhog can live in a highly uncertain environment, and be responsively engaged within it, yet create a high-certainty execution context... This ability to turn uncertainty into cer…

GE's FastWorks is "a framework for entrepreneurs, building on “The Lean Startup” ... an approach to developing new products that came out of “Agile” software development... It’s now being tried in manufacturing since GE and others believe that rapid learning cycles with customers will reduce the risk that you build something you can’t sell." Star…

A fun interactive setting out the 'ideal team & process' required for building interactives. Rarely seen in real life, sadly. - One Approach Leading Interactive Expeditions: Eric Cade Schoenborn | Creative Director | Knight Foundation

"Government around the world is pretty good at thinking about its own needs — they often put their political needs followed by the policy needs. The actual machine of government comes second. The third need then generally becomes the system needs, so the IT or whatever system’s driving it... the user comes a poor fourth, really." Turning that ups…