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Step Up on AI
I provided commentary on our need to step on AI capability and governance in Australia on this story in The Australian newspaper. I was quoted extensively in the article but I wrote a bunch more notes which might be of interest. Further Commentary In the regrettable case of the Knightscope security robot and the curious…
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Reasoning About Machine Intuition
This talk discusses the resurgence of Machine Learning and neural networks from multiple digital perspectives, including: I chose to use “intuition” to distinguish ML’s capability for pattern recognition in narrow tasks from other descriptions of intelligence. Find slides here. Outline Machine intuition, ftw What just happened? So, what’s next? Designing products with intuition Developing technology…
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Scaling Change
Once upon a time, scaling production may have been enough to be competitive. Now, the most competitive organisations scale change to continually improve customer experience. How can we use what we’ve learned scaling production to scale change? I recently presented a talk titled “Scaling Change”. In the talk I explore the connections between scaling production, sustaining…
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Scaling Change Spoiler
When software engineers think about scaling, they think in terms of the order of complexity, or “Big-O“, of a process or system. Whereas production is O(N) and can be scaled by shifting variable costs to fixed, I contend that change is O(N2) due to the interaction of each new change with all previous changes. We could…
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The life-changing magic of tidying your work
Surprise! Managing work in a large organisation is a lot like keeping your belongings in check at home. Get it wrong at home and you have mess and clutter. Get it wrong in the organisation and you have excessive work in progress (WIP), retarding responsiveness, pulverising productivity, and eroding engagement. Reading Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing…
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No Smooth Path to Good Design
The path to good design is bumpy, as we will demonstrate with four teapots. (Yes, teapots. Teapots are a staple of computer science and philosophy.) The path to good design matters, because if you are trying to build a design capability, the journey will be smoother if you understand that the path is bumpy. Leaders…
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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…
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Jetty to Jetty app
I released an app 🙂 – for iOS and Android. It’s a self-guided audio tour of historic sites in Broome, Western Australia, including beautiful stories told by locals. Nyamba Buru Yawuru developed the concept, curated the media, engaged local stakeholders, and were product owners for the app. This work was exciting for its value to the…
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Health Hack Perth 2015
HealthHack is a three-day event bringing medical researchers and health practitioners together with software creators to prototype a new generation of health products. Business News Western Australia covered the Perth 2015 event in: HealthHack – ailments, remedies in equal doses. I helped organise this event with assistance from sponsors ThoughtWorks and Curtin University (among numerous other generous…
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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…