Category: innovation
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Deliberate Data Leaks
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For the past five years or so, I’ve been taking photos at Gatwick Airport. No, not of planes taking off. Nothing as exciting as that. Photos of the water refill machines. I know. Exciting, right? It’s up there with my growing photo collection of crap hand dryers inspired by Dyson’s increasing terrible forays into the…
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How to use the Community Power Compass
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A practical walk through on how to use the Community Power Compass to evaluate and analyse communities in spaces like Web3.
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Introducing the Community Power Compass
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The background context for a beta version of a tool for investigating and evaluating different types of community, particularly those in the Web3 space.
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A bar without walls
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Spotted in a barber shop last week. I won’t name names, as I’m not entirely sure how legal it would be… During last summer, they opened up within strict COVID guidelines, as did the pub nearby. As with most pubs, the pub implemented a technology-powered table service system – just order where you are, and…
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The Entropy of Insights
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I was flipping through my Readwise highlights the other day, and came across this gem again. It’s the neatest wee description of entropy; moving “from rare configurations to common ones”. It started me thinking about a variety of projects from the last year, where I’ve been working with teams who benefit from taking a longer,…
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How To Resign – Three Tips From Ten Years Ago
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There are very few ways in which Smithery is like The Queen. The only one worth mentioning is that we both have two birthdays. Ten years ago today, on May 4th 2011, I resigned from my previous job as Chief Innovation Officer at the media agency PHD in London. I was going to start… well,…
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Practical starting points for a polymath
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I’ve been reading The Polymath by Peter Burke over the holidays. I make no pretence of being any sort of polymath in the sense Burke describes, but as a generalist who likes diving in and out of various disciplines the subject definitely appealed. It didn’t disappoint, and there are some things in particular I thought…
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Assemblage Space for Service Blueprints
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Yesterday I gave a talk on how some of the futures thinking from TENETS, specifically the Assemblage Space tool, might help teams move from current state to future state blueprints for Service Design. It was the talk I’d written yesterday’s Visual Fields post for. It was hosted by the fantastic SDN Dallas Team (thanks guys),…
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Visual Fields
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I’m giving an online talk shortly. In an hour and half from now, to be precise. As always, as I get closer to a talk the more ideas come to light, as the particles of information collide with each other, shedding new light on things. Sometimes, when giving talks to a room of folk, you…