Innovation

23 days ago

Innovation, Intention, Planning and Execution

  Convergence is an interesting thing. Greger Wiktrand and I have been trading posts back and forth on the subject of innovation for almost eighteen months now (forty posts in total). I’ve also been writing a lot on the concept of organizations as systems, (twenty-two posts over the last year, with some overlap with innovation). […]

30 days ago

Architecture Corner: Good at innovation – Seven Deadly Sins of IT

The latest season of Architecture Corner is a series of episodes on the Seven Deadly Sins of IT. I had the pleasure of appearing on “Good at innovation” with Greger Wikstrand, Casimir Artmann, and many others. In this, the first episode of the series, we deal with the sin of pride. What happens when the […]

1 month, 21 days ago

Innovation in Inner Space

  Long-time readers know that I have a rather varied set of interests and that I’ve got a “thing” for history, particularly military history. Knowing that, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I was recently reading an article titled “Cyber is the fourth dimension of war” (ground, sea and air being the first three […]

2 months, 3 days ago

The Seventy Million Dollar Question

  Just when I thought I was done posting for the week, they suck me back in. Juicero started lighting up my Twitter feed a little while ago. For those, like me, who have no earthly idea what Juicero is, it’s a startup that makes an “Internet-connected kitchen appliance”: Juicero’s flagship product is a $699 […]

2 months, 5 days ago

Form Follows Function on SPaMCast 438

Once again, I’m making an appearance on Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast. This week’s episode, number 438, features Tom’s essay on using sizing for software testing, Kim Pries with a Software Sensei column (canned solutions), and a Form Follows Function installment based on my post “Organizations as Systems and Innovation”. In this […]

2 months, 24 days ago

Square Pegs, Round Holes, and Silver Bullets

People like easy answers. Why spend time analyzing and evaluating when you can just take some thing or some technique that someone else has already put to use and be done with it? Why indeed? I mean, “me too” is a valid strategy, right? And we don’t want people to get off message, right? And […]

3 months, 7 days ago

A Tale of Two Tweets

Serendipity is a wonderful (and sometimes entertaining) thing. Monday afternoon, two tweets wound up one after the other in my timeline, one interesting and one “interesting” (I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which is which): and My favorite definition for the word “innovation” comes from Scott Berkun: If you must […]

3 months, 21 days ago

Fear of Failure, Fear and Failure

Some things seem so logically inconsistent that you just have to check them out. Such was the title of a post on LinkedIn that I saw the other day: “Innovation In Fear-Based Cultures? Or, why hire lions to be dogs?”. In it, Michael Graber noted that “…top-down organizations have the most trouble innovating.”: In particular, […]

4 months, 21 days ago

Organizations as Systems and Innovation

Over the last year or so, the concept of looking at organizations as systems has been a major theme for me. Enterprises, organizations and their ecosystems (context) are social systems composed of a fractal set of social and software systems. As such, enterprises have an architecture. Another long-term theme for this site has been my […]

6 months, 2 days ago

Managing Fast and Slow

People have a complicated relationship with the concept of cause and effect. In spite of the old saying about the insanity of doing the same old thing looking for a different result, we hope against hope that this time it will work. Sometimes we inject unnecessary complexity into what should be very simple tasks, other […]

6 months, 13 days ago

Learning Organizations: When Wrens Take Down Wolfpacks

What does the World War II naval campaign known as the Battle of the Atlantic have to do with learning and innovation? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Early in the war, Britain found itself in a precarious position. While being an island nation provided defensive advantages, it also came with logistical challenges. Food, […]

6 months, 15 days ago

Amazon’s ‘Old is New Again’ Innovation

Amazon’s unveiling Monday of its new brick and mortar venture, Amazon Go is, rightly so, generating a lot of interest: The full strategy, as reported on the Verge is for three types of stores in a range of sizes: Of the three varieties of stores Amazon is considering opening, the convenience store model is the […]