The Performance Myth reduces individuals to commodities or “performers,” whose value is contingent on meeting predefined metrics. This leads to a workplace culture where employees are c…| Paul Taylor
The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art has published my article Digital Government at the Crossroads. It explores the need for a radical rethink and reset to ‘digital government’ initiativ…| New tech observations from the UK (ntouk)
Applied outside of tech agile can usher in a fundamental shift from rigid, top-down planning to a dynamic, iterative, and, crucially, person-focused approach. Think about our place-based working experiments. What we understood, fundamentally, is that the answers to local problems lie locally. We didn't parachute in an army of consultants with a 200-page report, or do detailed journey maps. Instead, we enabled small, dedicated teams – often just a handful of people – to literally embed the...| Paul Taylor
I was kindly asked to write a guest article for the Digital Government Network to provide an overview of my book Fracture. The collision between technology and democracy—and how we fix it. The book…| New tech observations from the UK (ntouk)
Many of our institutions are in decline. The average lifespan of a civilisation is 336 years, Big companies used to have a lifespan of 61 years, now it’s down to 18. If all civiisations fall. then surely so must all companies and institutions?| Paul Taylor
The second edition of Fracture. The collision between technology and democracy—and how we fix it is out. It draws on over thirty years of “digital transformation” initiatives to explore…| New tech observations from the UK (ntouk)
A couple of recent UK government announcements indicate a renewed interest in a more substantial “government transformation” than the website-government model of recent years. The state…| New tech observations from the UK (ntouk)
Small = Optimised for Innovation Research suggests that smaller teams are more optimised for innovation. Indeed, as Dashun Wang and James A. Evans write for HBR, large teams can be better at development and deployment, but small teams are better at disruption. Their analysis of over 65 million patents uncovered a nearly universal pattern: whereas large teams tended to develop and further existing ideas and designs, their smaller counterparts tended to disrupt current ways of thinking wi...| Paul Taylor
The enemy of innovation is the management desire to centralise everything. Centralisation is often touted as being more efficient but it’s nothing of the sort. In truth it is a simply a corpo…| Paul Taylor
Speaking very personally, I’m living with the tension between being passionately up for both local government reorganisation and devolution and my equally strongly held belief that how you do something really has an impact on the outcome you are creating. This was always going to be a messy process and the balance between figure it ...| Catherine Howe
“CEO-ification” refers to the trend of nonprofits and charities to increasingly mirror corporate and military structures. Often they will adopt similar language, hierarchies, and strate…| Paul Taylor