Category: culture
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Random Roadtrip Radio
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We’ve been away for Easter in the campervan. I think we’ve seen all of the possible weathers of the United Kingdom through the ten days we were away. We have a fun music game for trips like this. Around three years ago, I copied the full text list of Rolling Stone magazine’s top 500 albums…
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Pokémon Gone
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I posted some writing yesterday about Pokémon Go, a fun throwaway remark in a book chapter I’m writing for Riccardo Torta & Beatrice Villari. Little did I know that the news was emerging that Niantic Spatial had announced a partnership with Coco Robotics to use build an accurate (ahem) model of cities around the world…
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Sussex is a Thing
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I was invited this week to give a short talk on day one of the Sussex & Brighton Devolution Policy Sprint, which was being held to start exploring requirements for the formation of a Mayoral Combined County Authority for the local government areas of East Sussex County Council, West Sussex County Council, and Brighton and…
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What *is* writing?
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If you aren’t going to really write something, I’m not really going to read it. This was a reaction I captured on a card a couple of weeks ago. I can’t even remember what spurred it; an extra long newsletter here, a suspicious long LinkedIn post. But definitely one of those pieces from 2025 that…
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Letter from a Steward
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I met Hardeep Kaur (or H) through a The STEPS Collective event in London that Chris Daniel shared to the Long Now London community he is a steward of. In subsequent conversations, H started talking about a Social Moonshot she was launching called Age of the Steward, and asked if I would be interested in writing for…
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Shearing layers and square metres
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Workplace Design shouldn’t be a paint by numbers job. But there’s one number that interests me in particular. A recent post by Bruce Daisley caught my eye. He has been looking at some recent research by Leesman showing that the top priority for people is for their workplace to provide a place where they can…
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Organisational Surface Area
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Calling Arno Penzias I want to talk about Arnos Penzias and his idea about the Surface Area of an organisation. I’ve been an EE (“Everything Everywhere”) customer for years now. I was an Orange customer before that, so just drifted over in the rebrand. I probably stayed because of inertia, but an inertia rooted in…
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Kaleidoscopes – Mechanisms for Meaningful Meetings
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Last month, I ran a ‘workshop about workshops’ for the good folks in Nesta’s Discovery Team. We played the world’s best warm-up game of Mundane Superhero, through the core theory of Information as Light, not Liquid, some hands-on mapping and clustering, a spot of LEGO Empathy Mapping, and more besides. In a way, it was…
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Where the work is
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‘Today’s vibe’ …is a thing I’ve done on LinkedIn for a while. It’s usually a passage I have read previously which chimes with the general feeling in the air today. That can be a resonance with work, exploration, circumstances or whatever. But the feeling today is… well, actually, I’m not going to go there. Because…
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Exploring the Evolution of Cards
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I spoke about cards at Papercamp 3 a little over a week ago. And I saw Tom Abba for the first time in person, since, perhaps, he and Duncan talked at the first card-based meetup I hosted in 2013. Which was nice. Then I repeated the talk at Friday’s monthly Cardstock online meetup. As usual,…
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Future Days – City Scanning
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As part of the first day at Future Days in Lisbon this week, I was invited to conduct a city scanning exercise Futures Days is a festival for futures and systemic thinkers, innovation-seekers, creatives, purpose-driven organizations and policy-makers to collectively create the futures of urban lives, equitable societies through and beyond technology. Working with the…
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Books as friends
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I had a great catchup with Dave Gray today, during which we talked a little about a post on bookshelves I’d shared on LinkedIn a few days back, in particular which books sit next to each other. Gamestorming, the book Dave wrote with Sunni Brown and James Macanufo, sits here for me – more towards…