Category: work
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Paired prompting
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I was talking to Tracey Camilleri yesterday about workplace design in the the age of LLMs, and then Chris Noessel about his forthcoming book, Cognitive Debt (and the potential for Cognitive Surplus), and I have a head full of ideas and desk full of new cards. Of those, this one felt worth trying to quickly…
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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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Cognitive Debt
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“Cognitive Debt is where you forgo the thinking in order just to get the answers, but have no real idea of why the answers are what they are.” Artefacts Newsletter 247 The idea of Cognitive Debt seems to have struck a chord with folk, in a good way (thank you Neil, Andrew and others who’ve…
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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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How I Created LEGO Serious Play
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…wait, what, that’s not true, how can you even go about claiming that? Of course I didn’t create LEGO Serious Play. But ChatGPT claims I did… It’s just so damn eager to please sometimes, it’ll say anything. Not that I’m sitting all day asking LLMs who I am (now there’s an identity crisis waiting to…
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Making the most of moments that matter
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As perhaps we all have, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting in the last few months about how to make those precious moments when people are together really matter. For a lot of people, the working week has been transformed by the pandemic, of course. Moving into this year, it feels that businesses now…
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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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Firing Korben Dallas
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There’s been a lot of attention paid to a comment that Jes Staley, CEO of Barclays, said on Wednesday 29th April 2020 in comments to reporters. “…the notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past.” The emphasis of that statement is about the infrastructure itself, and the notion…
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Table View: a video call hack
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During the first virtual Cardstock meetup on Friday, we (the collective group) mentioned we’d play around with different ways of making the ‘card method’ work for us all online, and report back. I was going to find this, a prototype made from an Ikea desk lamp and a webcam, from five years ago, and see…
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How many bags do you think that is?
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I’ve noticed that there’s a fascinating little exchange at the end of the Ocado process. After you’ve received all your shopping, the delivery driver will ask ‘have you got any bags to return?’. It’s the bag recycle scheme they’ve been doing for a few years, where they give you 5p for every bag you give…
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On not writing books
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“You should write a book.” Sometimes I say this to other people, sometimes other people say this to me. It came up again this week. Anjali and I had lunch, and spoke of our mutual delight on Neil announcing he’s writing a second book. The first book is a super useful read, a manual to…