Simon G's Blog

I enjoyed reading "The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups" by Daniel Coyle. It has lots of great stories about groups in various fields (SEALs, sports teams, corporate environments, creative companies, aircraft crew and more) and the various (often subtle) attributes that makes these teams successful. Key takeaways for me were: Safety is the foundation on which strong culture is built. Our brain is obsessed with psychological safety and we require lots of signalling over and over to feel safe. A sense of belonging is easy to destroy and hard to build. Patterns of interaction of successful groups that have good chemistry often include: Close physical proximity, often in circles Profuse amounts of eye contact Physical touch (handshakes, fist bumps, hugs) Lots of short, energetic exchanges (no long speeches) High levels of mixing; everyone talks to everyone Few interruptions Lots of questions Intense, active listening Humour, laughter...

Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone and Yuri Van Geest contains lots of useful information about how to give your organisation a chance of survival (be it a new one or an existing one of any size). It was repetitive at times and at points it felt like a Singularity University sales pitch but there was sufficient useful content for me to deem it a worthy read. My key takeaways: "Once any domain, discipline, technology or industry becomes information-enabled and powered by information flows, its price/performance begins doubling approximately annually."  Ray Kurzweil Rather than owning assets or workforces and incrementally seeing a return on those assets, Exponential Organisations (ExOs) leverage external resources (people, systems, machines etc.) to achieve their objectives. An exception to this is for scarce resources and assets. Maintaining a small core allows significant flexibility.  It also brings in fresh perspectives and expertise. E...

The Lean Startup is a book I have been meaning to read for years and never got around to. It contains lots of useful advice and good case studies explaining experiences of what has and hasn't work. The book is oriented towards software development startups (and software development innovation in general in any sized organisation) and could have easily been condensed into a third its size. Key takeaways: Build, Measure, Learn (go through this loop as fast as you can) Use validated learning and measure using actionable metrics, not vanity metrics. Use cohort analysis. Do split testing to measure what matters to customers Build a Minimal Viable Product (MVP), gain quick feedback from customers, learn quickly and evolve as required Use 5 whys for root cause analysis and identifying what to target in terms of improvements

Sprint is a superb book that is very easy to read, with real world examples of how to apply the techniques discussed. I have taken some of the concepts discussed and am applying them to other activities beyond a 5 day Sprint process. Thoroughly recommended.

I attended the inspirational  Gather 2015 unconference today. As described on the website for the event “It is the digital, technical and creative community’s big day out”. There were several sessions running simultaneously and it was hard to choose what to go to since there were so many interesting topics. Below is a summary of my key takeaways (or interpretations thereof) from the sessions I attended. UAVs, Internet of Things, 3DVR: What are we going to do with these things? How do we get us/our companies/NZ to lead the way? What can we do to take advantage? These are the questions - does the room have the answers? MAKER CHANGE BUSINESS @lancewiggs Future Skynet Remote Monitoring UAV Tour - e.g. rent a UAV and do tour of Egypt Auto-herding GPS in humans Better battery life Sensors inc. in building beams to say if leak problem Track robber Traffic control Drone based terror Evidence-based thinking Data —> Interpretation Auto milk ordering fro...