The one pager is a beautiful tool. It’s one page. It is something that you are bringing to a persons’ mind. It contains a limited amount of language – around 300 words or less if there is a chart or many bullet points. Most people can read it in around 90 seconds, though, some can do it in 60 seconds. Those are the constraints. You use tools to achieve goals. We’ll start there, dive into each one, and I’ll conclude with a few experiences. Goals Three common goals are to persuade, to declare, or to engage. Persuasion is often about convincing oneself, another, or a group to form a belief. Declaration is often about sharing or proclaiming a decision, fact,[…]
Tag: business
What if the rate of forgetting is interrelated with the rate of learning? What might that mean? The Knowledge Funnel The Knowledge Funnel is a model that describes how knowledge is made useful by an organization. At one side, you got mysteries. We live in an era where the number of mysteries vastly outnumbers the amount of knowledge. There is no shortage of mystery. Heuristics are rules of thumb that work most of the time, but not all of the time. There are lot of heuristics. They tend to form the core value driver for many organizations. There are comparatively fewer algorithms. Those organizations that have fit algorithms are often extraordinarily profitable and competitive. Some researchers focus on converting mysteries[…]
This post is a continuation of The Technology of Productive Meetings from November 2019. Below, you’ll find a summary two frameworks: ORID and Stances, before extending it further. This post is intended for those on the human side of data science. Carbon is harder than silicon. Summary The ICA teaches a group facilitation method that features the ORID framework. The ORID (Objective, Reflective, Interpretive, Decision) framework offers a path for a group of individuals to ship a decision. While the facilitator helps the group through the steps, it is the group itself that ships the decision. The method acknowledges the way people feel their way through a decision. The facilitator crafts a sequence of questions which match each one of[…]
I used to conjure Louis Del Grande to appear on my television. I used steel wool on the antenna of a black and white set, Tuesday’s at 7 or 8pm, on CBC. Louis played a tabloid journalist that fought crime, fought his wife, fought the Crown, cracked jokes, and in the end would solve the murder mystery with a fuzzy psychic flashback. The show was called, wait for it, Seeing Things. I thought it was neat how he could see the past so clearly, with psychic flashbacks, often at the most inconvenient time. I remember wanting to see the future like that. It was unlike anything I remember watching on television. Last night I scrolled through over a hundred titles[…]
In this post, I’ll outline some of the best parts about product managing data science. Data science is the creation of product from data, requiring a blend of the skills of technology, statistics, and business. Product Management brings and keeps product in the world, requiring a blend of the skills of technology, user experience, and business. All of the challenges of product management appear in data science. And then some. The Knowledge Funnel The Knowledge Funnel is a concept introduced by Roger Martin in Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (2009). At the top of the funnel, you got mysteries. It would seem that there are an uncountable number of mysteries. In the middle, you have heuristics,[…]
Upon reflecting on 2019 and the decade that was, I’ll ask, perhaps more competition is needed? There is no Call To Action, nor a verdict. It’s an open ended question. On one hand, competition is amazing for the consumer in the short and long runs, and fantastic for innovation in the medium to long run. When companies compete, you win. And they invest in R&D. On the other hand, competition inhibits the ability of a small set of firms to corner and extract the maximum amount of rent. A lack of competition is fantastic for the shareholders in the short run, and absolutely terrible for consumers and society in the medium and long run. On balance, I believe that competition[…]
Can meetings be more productive? The BBC’s Sean Coughlan wrote a piece entitled “Pointless work meetings really a form of therapy” and it struck a chord. I shared that out on Friday, November 15, 2019. It’s a short press summary of what Patrik Hall co-authored in a book. The press doesn’t say what that book is. So I wrote Patrik. The book is called Mötesboken : tolkningar av arbetslivets sammanträden och rosévinsmingel. His co-author, Malin Akerstrom, wrote a related paper – The Merry Go Round of Meetings: Embracing Meetings in a Swedish Youth Care Project. It is worth a read. I have a few thoughts. There are (at least) two forms of technology: physical technology and social technology. Physical technology[…]
The main point is that it’s worth trying to predict technology triggers and asking what those triggers mean. There is value in answering the question so what? A secondary argument is that questions beginning with what if? can be very interesting, but far less reliable than so what? What is a Technology Trigger? The term Technology Trigger is from Gartner’s Hype Cycle. They defined it as: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven. Gartner Research The term has been deprecated in favour of the term innovation trigger. However, as an owner of the hardcover book Managing The Hype Cycle (2008), I[…]
There are at least two systems of achieving productivity growth: path dependence and disruption. What if there is a third way? This post unpacks that paragraph and explores ways through. It will start with explaining lock in and path dependence. We’ll cover the application narrow machine intelligence in a very narrow industry. It will end with a small scenario and a few what ifs. Lock In Consider banner advertising. This is a relatively old industry. Its roots predate the Internet by at least a couple hundred years. It may have started thousands of years ago. It starts out with a person with a problem. They need to get the word out about their product or service. Reframed, they need to[…]
Torben Iversen and Anne Wren wrote (1998) “Equality, Employment, and Budgetary Restraint: The Trilemma of the Service Economy” and published it in World Politics, (50), 4, pp. 507-546. And it’s a good read. And you could read it for yourself right here. Here’s a summary in one image: What It Means What causes the Trilemma itself? It’s the idea that productivity doesn’t really grow in a pure local services economy. A restaurant can only serve so many meals, barber cut so many heads, a teacher so many students, a surgeon so many people, a police officer so many arrests. It’s far harder to get compounded year on year growth in productivity in services. As I’ll argue below, it isn’t impossible.[…]