What are you letting disappear in plain sight?
Leadership involves cleaning away the soot of daily operation to reveal and protect the beautiful, enduring elements of a community's heritage.
Creativity
Ideas get better when we test them. Essays on curiosity, experimentation, design thinking and making room for something we have not tried before.
18 articles. The highlighted label is each article’s primary category; other labels are secondary tags.
The best bit of fish pie isn’t the fish pie
Valuable innovations often emerge as unintended consequences of core work; leaders should nurture a 'store cupboard' of curiosity to capture them.
The beauty of a mistake, now legendary.
Instead of reacting to failures with panic, leaders should pause to notice the new possibilities and stories that emerge from unexpected moments.
The secret of leading from a high school band.
Leadership is not dictation; it is creating conditions where others can contribute their unique talents to build something extraordinary together.
When confident is too confident… and when it’s not.
No matter how thought-through you think your ideas might be, in general, humans are over-confident, emotional and irrational.
Writing is thinking. Thank you for being part of our thinking.
Nothing is too sacred when it comes to being the best community you can be, for today. But whatever you do, write it down together, regularly.
Efficient Process vs Happy Accidents
Community conversations might not change your decision - but they will change the way you go about realising it, for the better.
You could always do with more data. Sometimes you just need to do it.
You're not asking people to imagine your idea (which they never can). You're asking them to use a real thing.
Improvisation beats planning, hands down.
Improvisation is hard work. It takes hours - years - of invisible-to-the-crowd practice, and sometimes it doesn’t quite work out as planned.
Assume all new ideas are bad. Then work on them.
If you hold onto your ideas too tightly for too long then you end up blind to new ideas and opportunities around you.
Seek out some strategic tension: it gives us better ideas.
Doing real strategy is hard, though, because you're going to annoy someone on the way.
Show, don’t tell; listen, don’t preach.
All too often, we tell young people what to do because it’s so much easier than showing them. Septuagenarian rocker Alice Cooper has rewritten his perennia
A new device that will open up conversations you’ve never had before.
I spent four days in the Japanese Alps one summer, away from distractions. The irony of stepping away from work is that my brain seems to make more connections and gain far more clarity.
How you can never run out of time.
I tend to write our weekly newsletter, the Provocation, on a Friday afternoon. This time last week I was struggling to write Monday’s newsletter.
Design for trickiest customer on the worst day
At the turn of the 1800s, London’s population doubled, making it the biggest city in the world. But it was designed for a population half its size. People
If you can’t start small you can’t end big.
On a crisp spring weekend coming out of the pandemic, I played with the Edinburgh University Jazz Orchestra again for the first time in 27 years.
How to waste €200m by trying to please everyone
The Stadio Delle Alpi was built in Turin for the Italia ‘90 World Cup. You can imagine what the brief should’ve been: create a soccer stadium that a billio
Avoid launching your next big idea. At all costs.
Avoid launching your next big idea. At all costs. After months of devising a fresh idea, and months more planning and researching, it’s tempting to reward