Stakeholder gridlock revisited

A few posts ago (here) Brian was describing using an influence matrix with a group of Naval Architecture students. He said, ” … they concluded (correctly) that there is stakeholder gridlock. Every stakeholder is waiting for another stakeholder to change first. A profound insight for a student group, and a situation that is rare.” Here’s [...]

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Work smarter not harder

It is Friday, so some subversive thoughts inspired by David Gurteen’s Knowledge Cafe on ‘conversations’ in Edinburgh last night. Use at your own risk. No liabilities accrue to David (or me). “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” Douglas Adams A tiny Google Android team has just wiped [...]

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Innovation, marketing and the user experience 3 of 3 – Power to the People

[A word of explanation about the picture. The big circle shows a network analysis of users / customers and a cluster of marketeer / business valuer, technical innovator, and UX / service designer. The yellow arrows show the interactions between this cluster and lead users to enable co-creation. The background to the circle illustrates a [...]

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Innovation, marketing and the user experience 2 of 3 – Power to the Process

‘Teh interweb’ arrives and brings complexity in its wake. The MSM has no effective answer to GoogleAds. The High St. under-estimates the threat of online shopping. B2B starts to build online auctions, market-places. Marketing becomes more automated, cost-effective, and targetted (right-hand side of picture). The long tail becomes tractable. Marketing types worry over how refined [...]

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Innovation, marketing and the user experience 1 of 3 – Power to the Brand

The heyday of old-style marketing: broadcasting to the target demographic, a short tail that is ignored, and clipboard market research.  Users are treated as a segmented collective, aggregated into statistics. Traditional corporate R&D labs perform the product development, with all the strengths and weaknesses that they bring.  Development follows the traditional ‘V’ shaped waterfall lifecycle. [...]

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In defence of HMRC

HMRC has come in for quite a bashing lately, from John Seddon and the Public Accounts Committee report pdf. One of the criticisms has been lack of end user involvement. From Q42: Dame Lesley Strathie: “If I were to criticise the programme, I would say that the linkages between the programme and the business were [...]

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Top 25 signs (of a much longer list) that a workshop isn’t working

Signs that the workshop could have been better prepared: At the end the problem owner says things like “Well, that was a bloody waste of time, as I knew it would be.” When the facilitator asks the problem owner if the workshop seems to be going the way he expected, he says things like “You [...]

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Stakeholder gridlock

The post-its above came from an exercise with Naval Architecture students, who were trying to produce an influence map. The map has high influence at the top, low influence at the bottom. The small change required on the left. large change needed on the right. They stopped at this point because they concluded (correctly) that [...]

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