innovation culture

04. The Illusion of Progress : Action Bias leads us to believe that doing something – anything – is better than doing nothing , even when the action doesn’t actually move us forward. We equate busyness with productivity, mistaking motion for progress, and perceive novelty as innately valuable.

01. Fear of Being Wrong : Our decisions are often driven by Loss Aversion – the cognitive bias that makes us more afraid of failure than excited by potential success. In a world where a single misstep can get us “bollocked,’ we stick with what feels safe, even when it’s clearly not working.

Notably, this theory completely omits the role of the real estate developer, who has a greater influence than anyone else in how a building comes together. Skyscrapers are designed by architects, but it’s the developer who conceives of the project, arranges the funding, hires the design team, and ultimately decides what the building will be. To me,... See more

Why is data integration so hard? The data is often in different formats that aren’t easily analyzed by computers – PDFs, notebooks, Excel files (my god, so many Excel files) and so on. But often what really gets in the way is organizational politics: a team, or group, controls a key data source, the reason for their existence is that they are the... See more

Engineering organizations today have ballooned to huge numbers of people, but these huge engineering organizations don’t exactly have a reputation for high velocity output. Some of this is the result of what happens with products at scale: it is just fundamentally faster and easier to iterate, improve, or change a product with 100 users than it is... See more

all our models that justify transport investment assume that travel time is always a disutility. In other words, the more time you spend in transit, the worse off you are. If you come along with fancy ideas suggesting that people may sometimes prefer slower to faster, it fucks up our whole model.”

So this is what’s happened to the world:... See more

Painting and sculpture are now free, inasmuch as anyone may produce any sort of creation and subsequently display it. In architecture, however, this fundamental freedom, which must be regarded as a precondition for any art, does not exist, for a person must first have a diploma in order to build. Why?

Everyone should be able to build, and as long as... See more