All Posts

Are You Playing to Win - Or Not Lose?

The Rose Bowl stadium was a caldron of tension in the closing moments of the 1994 football World Cup final. Under the sapping heat and through two grinding hours of regulation and extra time, Italy and Brazil had fought each other to a stalemate. To split the teams and crown a new World Cup champion, it all now rested on the penalty shootout and the individual bravery of a few chosen players. In the 64 year history of the World Cup this would be the first one to be decided by

Dec 165 min read

Learning Cultures

A busy U.S. teaching hospital unit was tracking a high number of potentially life-threatening errors. They were recording 23.7 errors per 1,000 patent days when administering drugs . The nurse manager spotted wearing blood-stained scrubs. She was spending the majority of her time nursing and only about a third of her time managing the unit. She seemed comfortable with error, saying that a “certain level of error will occur.” And she’d created a "non-punitive environment” w

Dec 96 min read

Signals Not Scandals

The B-17 Flying Fortress was the main US heavy bomber of WW2. It was an incredibly successful design. 12,731 were built and they dropped more bombs than any other aircraft in the war. They were rugged, stable, and capable of sustaining incredibly heavy damage and still return home. But they had a major issue. The pilots kept breaking them. Throughout the war stressed, tired and confused pilots would land their planes and then suddenly retract the wheels. The planes would

Dec 24 min read

The Toxic Spiral of Blame

Years ago I had a manager who inadvertently created an incredibly toxic working environment. They were a person who was driven by instinct. When something goes wrong it’s instinctive to think “Who’s to blame?” This was the manager’s immediate reaction every time. It has the benefit of immediate closure. The person at fault would be identified. The puzzle was solved. And the manager could be happy with their instincts being proved right again. Only the world doesn’t operate

Nov 256 min read

Upstream Thinking

There’s a parable for upstream thinking and it goes a little like this: Two friends are sitting by a river when suddenly they see a child drowning. They react immediately, diving in and hauling the child to safety. Just then another struggling child appears, so back in they jump to repeat the rescue. Then another child appears, and another, and another… Suddenly one of the friends jumps out and runs off. The other friend keeps working away, rescuing child after child and gett

Nov 182 min read

Seek Forgiveness, Not Permission

“It’s better to ask for forgiveness than seek permission.” It’s an axiom that was popularised by Grace Hopper. How do you get into a university you're barred from? Grace Hopper was born in New York in 1906. She wanted to go to university and study mathematics. It was a very unusual option for women at the time. “I loved mathematics all the way through school, especially geometry. I used to draw pretty pictures with it. It’s not really unusual for a woman to have an interest i

Nov 144 min read

Playing Infinite and Finite Games

Infinite Thinking In 1868, after the death of his father, 14-year-old George Eastman was forced to leave school and find work as a messenger boy. In his early twenties, now working as a bank clerk and planning a vacation, he purchased a photographic outfit to record the trip, which he described as "a pack-horse load.” He quickly became passionate about photography, fascinated with the complex chemical processes involved and experimenting with making the wet film plates used a

Nov 114 min read

Open or Closed?

Geoffrey Boycott was a cricketer who played 108 test matches (the five day game) for England from 1962 to 1986. By the end of his England career he’d amassed a record number of runs for an England player. He was England's opening batsmen - possibly the hardest role in cricket. His job was to be the anchor of the team, making sure that the team got a good start by facing fresh bowlers and the new ball, with the aim of staying at bat for as long as possible. Boycott had staying

Nov 77 min read

Boring Managers Get All the Luck

On the 5th January 1922 at the age of 47, legendary explorer Ernest Shackleton died of a heart attack. He died during his fourth, and for obvious reasons, final expedition. In the hours before his death the expedition's doctor, Alexander Macklin had advised him to calm down and "lead a more regular life”, to which Shackleton answered, "You are always wanting me to give up things, what is it I ought to give up?" and Macklin replied, "Chiefly alcohol, Boss." Shackleton’s death

Nov 43 min read

Creative Learning

I had dinner with a group of founders and business leaders. The person sat on my left was a drummer in a ska band. The person sat on my right played keyboards in a Norwegian wedding band. And, back when blogs were a thing, I ran the third largest snowboard blog in the world, and I continue to write posts like these today. We all had creative hobbies outside of our jobs. Do creative hobbies help? “If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative, you have to not have the

Oct 282 min read

The Bad Apple Effect

The Philadelphia 76ers were on a terrible run of form. It was the 1972-73 NBA basketball season, they'd lost six games in a row and were busy losing again. The coach Roy Rubin knew he had to make a change. One of his players that night was the notoriously hard playing defensive forward John Q Trapp. Trapp had joined the team at the start of the season and came in with a bad reputation. During his recruitment the 76ers assistant coach warned that he was “absolutely uncoachab

Oct 215 min read

Darwin & the Power of Cumulative Learning

Darwin was not born a genius. In his book, Letters to a Young Scientist , the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson argued that Darwin probably had an IQ in the 130 range. He was not a genius student. He dropped out of medical school, before completing a Bachelor of Arts degree. In his letters he looked back at his natural abilities saying, “I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men … my power to follow a long and purely abstract tra

Oct 155 min read