Category: Culture

  • 22 rules of generative AI, 2 years on, Ghibli intermission

    22 rules of generative AI, 2 years on, Ghibli intermission

    This update comes at the peak of the Ghiblification fad. There’s nothing new here and yet I found the release of and response to GPT 4o image generation, including mechanistically crushed and artificially reconstituted Ghibli, particularly shocking. So here’s a retrospective case study for the recent review of rule #10 (labelling ingredients) and a longer…

  • Waste not Programmable

    Waste not Programmable

    Programmable 2025 Melbourne featured a fantastic program, heavy on practical data & AI in an apt reflection of the times. It was also a great chance to catch up with many in the Melbourne tech community. I presented my 7 Wastes of Data Production talk. In the spirit of continuous improvement, I made some minor…

  • What to expect when you weren’t expecting an R&D project

    What to expect when you weren’t expecting an R&D project

    This was supposed to be a regular digital project that consistently made progress towards the objective… right? Problem statement, some analysis, build a solution bit by bit, deploy, …, nice linear progression… but no… we were wrong! It turned out to be an R&D project. Often R&D projects change direction and sometimes seem to go…

  • Dealing with data inventory

    Dealing with data inventory

    Data held by businesses is often described as an asset. This can be misleading or even incorrect. In any case, data managed inappropriately leaves value on the table, inflates cost, reduces responsiveness, and creates risk. Some data held by businesses would better be described as inventory. It might one day be a true asset, but…

  • R&D burn up

    R&D burn up

    This article captures the key points of a conversation I have quite often with teams involved in exploratory work, and their stakeholders. Typical burn up We’re used to burn up charts looking like the examples in this description from Atlassian – a roughly horizontal scope line which we work towards with a roughly diagonal completed…

  • 22 rules of generative AI

    22 rules of generative AI

    Thinking about adopting, incorporating or building generative AI products? Here are some things to think about, depending on your role or roles. I assume you’re bringing your own product idea(s) based on an understanding of an opportunity or problems for customers. These rules therefore focus on the solution space. Solutions with generative AI typically involve…

  • Concrete Culture Change

    Concrete Culture Change

    Culture is often difficult to define, and culture change even more so – what concrete actions do we need to take to change a culture? Despite this apparent difficulty, it is possible to spend an hour or two with a group, and leave with consensus on practical actions for culture change. This exercise achieves that…

  • Arguments with Agency

    Arguments with Agency

    Here are slides from my talk at LASTconf 2015. The title is “Bring Your A-Game to Arguments for Change”. The premise is that there are different types of arguments, more or less suited to various organisational and delivery scenarios, and the best ones have their own agency. In these respects, you can think of them like…