Here’s a summary of a couple of talks by Fred Kofman. Thanks to Jen Allum, now leading X (Alphabet’s moonshot factory), who I worked with when she was Director of GOV.UK, for the recommendation. Your job is the goal you pursue – not the activity you do What you do is only ever a means …
Author Archives: martin
Futures Thinking and Strategic Foresight – Summary of Become a futurist, by the Metafuture School
I recently completed a course on Futures Studies – Become a futurist, by the Metafuture School. Here are some of the key insights. General planning thinks about one future. Futures thinking, in contrast, thinks about multiple possible futures. (The field of futures/foresight used to be about concrete things like predicting future demand, but there’s so …
Resolving team tension
A summary of some recent training that I attended on resolving team tension. Trust and psychological safety are central to my leadership style, so I was pleased to learn about Lencioni’s 5 dysfunctions of a team and how trust is at the foundation of effective teams. Healthy tension and unhealthy tension Healthy team tension manifests …
Cross-government design meeting #33: Measuring success – 18/1/22
The cross-government design community runs great events. Here are some highlights from my notes from last week’s session on measuring success. Measuring the value of service transformation – Matthew Lyon, Head of Economics and Analysis, Central Digital and Data Office (Cabinet Office) Reform of the Animal Licensing service led to a 50% reduction in processing …
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Turn the Ship Around – summary
David Marquet’s Turn the Ship Around is a great book on the power of intent-based leadership, of working with your team’s intelligence rather than treating people as order-following automatons. Here’s a summary of the key points. Treating people as followers or as cogs in a machine is wasteful People acting simply to follow orders can …
Managing Change
Key points from some recent training I attending on managing change. Focus on the emotional side more than the concrete aspects of change. Don’t get stuck arguing about logic. Anything you can do to reduce the threat that people perceive will help. For change to happen the Vision of the desired future state + the …
Interoperability, Open Standards and APIs
I recently attended GDS Tech Talks: Interoperability and Open Standards. Here are my notes on the sessions I attended. What’s new in Web Standards? – Dan Appelquist Dan is Samsung Internet Director of Web Advocacy, co-chair of the W3C Technical Architecture Group and Open Standards Board member. Connections between the web and your device: WebNFC …
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Build a food bank API – part 3
Read part 1 or part 2 of this project to find out the background to this post. The API now exists online. Here’s an example request for the nearest 5 foodbanks to latitude 52.629958, longitude 1.298408. Results are returned in JSON format, which is machine-readable. I have plans for a human-facing experience too. The service …
Build a food bank API – part 2
I’ve made great progress on this work in the last couple of months. (Read part 1 of my project to create a foodbank API) My goal was “Make an API that, for a given geolocation, returns the nearest 3 foodbanks, with a list of the items that they need.” I’ve achieved this for something running …
ODI Summit 2019 – summary
A summary of the sessions I attended at the Open Data Institute’s Summit on 12 November 2019 Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt, interviewed by Zoe Kleinman Tim Berners-Lee described commercial advertising as “win-win”, because targeted advertising is more relevant. But “political advertising is very different… people are being manipulated into voting for things which are …