Category: Blog

What if hierarchical organisation charts were replaced with a chain of who solves problems for who going from the CEO to the users.

Lesson of the month is ‘simplicity’. However big and complicated something is, pulling out the simplest small part of it is the fastest way to progress. Sometimes things like complicated just because they aren’t well coordinated. Simplification makes coordination easier too.

Contributing to the digital transformation of the charity sector

It’s been a interesting month of moving from definition to the development work. I always know that the transition is never straightforward and clean cut like all the models show but I still get slightly surprised by it. Project phases are an illusion.

I didn’t get onto the work I was expecting/hoping to do around the continuous improvement model for the product but I did progress the decision around the use of virtual meetings platform. And as always, I did lots of other things.

I resigned from my role at the Prince’s Trust and am joining RNID as a Product Lead.

Learning about innovation, technology, product and design

I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of innovat100n.com. FutureSkills.info is a more interesting idea with better defined audience and at least some idea for a potential marketing plan, and I’ve already made more progress than I ever did with writing a hundred essays about innovation.

I’ve enjoyed writing the Irregular Ideas newsletter for the past five weeks. Being a newsletter rather than blog posts adds some constraints which I think/hope are improving my writing and I like that it has a broad topic.

I didn’t add any more stiles as NFT’s. Just wasn’t a priority. It would be nice to get all of my stiles on Opensea but it’s very time-consuming I don’t know what I’ll do with them once they’re on there.

I did a bit of research into DAO’s for future.charity but not enough to really progress the idea. There is still something really interesting to explore there but it’s big and messy and amorphous and very uncertain.

I wrote quite a few blog posts for NoBloPoMo but not the full thirty I was intending too. I decided to refocus on other projects.

Didn’t do any work on Adjacencies and losing a bit of interest in it.

I finished the Foundations of Humane Technology course. I want to try to embed some of the stuff I learned in my product thinking so I might write a blog post about it as a way to start to collect together some thinking about humane tech.

I wrote weeknotes on schedule every week.

Leading an intentional life

My nomadic life along the coastline continued. The weather and dark evenings haven’t stopped me from visiting beautiful places each day.

Innovation is a challenge in the charity sector. Not only are charities stuck between constraints on funding innovation and the need to create new value and better ways of operating, but all of the innovation methodologies are aimed at commercial organisations. So, how do charities innovate? How do they take a good idea and create social good?

I interviewed four charities with innovation teams in order to try to find out. We discussed their innovation processes, their motivations for innovating and how they judge the success of innovations.

From an analysis of research I built a theory for innovation in charities and develop the ‘charity innovation model’ which plots the approach a charity takes towards innovation on a two-by-two matrix by assessing common characteristics in motivation to innovate, implementation of innovation process and the judging of innovation success to indicate whether the innovations produced are likely to be incremental or radical innovation and strategic or social innovation.

The research concludes that charities do not use their innovation teams to develop radical new solutions to tackle social issues which contributes to answering the question often raised about charity innovation; ‘if charities are innovating, why are there still so many social issues?’

The full research write-up is here.

The Center for Human Technology offers an online course aimed at people working in tech to encourage us to consider how we can make technologies more humane.

Foundations of Humane Technology will prepare product teams to create technology that treats attention and intention as sacred, protects well-being, minimizes unforeseen consequences, and ultimately builds our collective capacity to address the most urgent challenges facing humanity.

It’s easy to tell ourselves that if we don’t work on large scale social platforms that our products have no means to cause harm and so we don’t need to think about these things, but in fact unless we understand and amplify the message that all technology should be humane, how can we ever make any technology better?

The course consists of eight self-paced modules.

• Setting the Stage – What challenges define this moment in history and how can the technology we build help to address them?
• Creating Shared Understanding – How can technology engender the trust and understanding we need to solve complex problems together?
• Respecting Human Nature – How can technology work in harmony with the vulnerabilities and biases with which all humans have evolved?
• Narrowing the Gap – How can technology address inequity and practically integrate voices of people who experience harm?
• Minimizing Harmful Consequences – What economic forces affect products, and how can product teams help address and reduce harmful externalities?
• Helping People Thrive – How can products help people act in alignment with their deeper intentions, rather than optimizing for engagement?
• Centering Values – How do the conditions of our lives shape our values? How might product development be informed by metrics but centered on values?
• Ready To Act – How can we create a culture of humane technology inside of our workplaces and broader industry?

All product teams teams should do the course, ideally together so they can talk about the issues and ideas the course raises. If you’re interested, sign-up now.