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It Stands to Reason…

23 January, 2019 by James Lawther 3 Comments

Test and Learn

Books or concrete? Imagine you are on the board of an educational charity.  You are trying to improve the standard of education in Sub-Saharan Africa. How should you invest the charitable donations?  What would be the most effective way to spend the money? In his book Adapt, Tim Harford tells the story of the Dutch […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: assumptions, continuous improvement, human nature, learning, test and learn

How to Get Better at Anything — Almost

14 January, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Performance Improvement

How to lose weight There is a tried and tested way to lose weight…. Commit to losing weight. Measure progress — stones or kilos, whichever works. Find the most important input, the one with most leverage, (calories) and measure that as well. Try things that will have a positive impact on the important input. Use […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement, Tools & Techniques Tagged With: accountability, best practice, continuous improvement

Blame or Solutions?

8 January, 2019 by James Lawther 2 Comments

Finding Blame

Blame is natural The minute something goes wrong we seek out somebody to blame.  Somebody to take the rap.  It is human nature to find a fall guy when things go belly up. Blame is easy We live in a connected world.  We work within a mesh of colleagues, customers and suppliers, so there are […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: blame, culture, root cause analysis

Do You Believe in Brainstorming?

2 January, 2019 by James Lawther 6 Comments

Conventional wisdom Noun: The generally accepted belief or opinion about a particular matter. Conventional wisdom may be proven to be untrue. Example: It is widely believed that before the voyage of Christopher Colobus most people thought that the world was flat. This is however not true.  The myth of the flat earth Brainstorming What do you do when you need a novel solution? The answer is obvious, you hold a brainstorming session. I’ve been doing them for 30 […]

Filed Under: Blog, Tools & Techniques, Wild Cards Tagged With: beliefs, best practice, brainstorm, dogmatism, innovation

The Frog, the Pig and the Princess

23 December, 2018 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Muppet Personality Test

Order or chaos? In 2012 Dahlia Lithwick came up with the ultimate personality test. Forget Myers Briggs and Belbin, the true measure of who you are is the Muppet Test. Lithwick based the Muppet Test on her observation that there are two types of Muppet with two distinct types of personality. The ultimate personality test […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: group think, human nature, innovation, roles and responsibilities, stereotype, teamwork

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