Power Over The Future

Quote from a recent article from political journalist Patrick Cockburn in the i newspaper: “In Chinese mythology the beetle walks from east to west each day, exhausted but proud that he is pulling the sun behind him. He knows that if he pauses in his daily journey the sun will pause and, if he stops,

Contrasting Simplicity With Complexity

“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.” – Edsger Dijkstra (computer scientist)

Quantitative Versus Qualitative Research

I was once asked to find out how lessons learned in bids and projects were captured and shared in a large company. There were two approaches, a standard IT one that identified company-wide portals and databases, number of users/reports/views, ease of use etc. The other was to interview a selected group of people, partly to

Choosing Useful Questions

A good example of reframing to ask the right (or a more useful) question. In general, time is often well spent thinking about the question rather than rushing off for ‘answers/solutions’.

Speaking Skills And The Liking Gap

I came across this recently (from the blog of Ed Batista, who is a business coach): “A mental model I held about myself for years was that I was a poor public speaker. I’d get nervous before a presentation or speech, I interpreted my sweaty palms and the pit in my stomach as evidence of

Critical Thinking and Rough Estimates

I’ve always been a fan of qualitative (back of the envelope) calculations. This started when I was an undergraduate doing my physics degree. After my career in academia ended and I moved to government and commercial work, I was interested to find that similar methods can also be used there (adapted accordingly of course). The

The Challenge Of Reinventing Yourself

Helpful sketchnote from Tanmay Vora on career reinvention (see his site for many other related sketchnotes). I’ve commented previously (see here) on how reinvention can be viewed as a sort of personal R&D.

Recent Chinese Achievements

I wasn’t aware of the tremendous scope of recent Chinese technical achievements and it was handy that someone had trawled the web to put this presentation together. Full article is here. I can’t find an original reference for this presentation (it came through social media). Google searches didn’t produce anything immediately but the content is

Dialogue Versus Discussion

How much dialogue do you have a day? See here.

The Biases We Often Have, Mostly Unknowingly

Good infographic of some of the more well-known cognitive biases. A full list (over 150 of them) is available here: “Although the reality of most of these biases is confirmed by reproducible research, there are often controversies about how to classify these biases or how to explain them… There are also controversies over some of