I meet Malcolm in a small café on the Upper West Side during one of my early visits to New York. Our small talk is mostly about coffee and the weather, which is just as well. Although he cuts a slight figure, there is...
Firstly, apologies to those asking where the blogs posts have gone. I took a break over summer for a number of personal reasons, but getting back into the swing of it now. I’ve been saying for a while that the...
When I was 18, the IRA hid a bomb outside Belfast Castle, where my sister was celebrating her wedding. It was nothing personal – the security forces had been tipped off, so the bombers had to dump their device before...
What fish can teach us about setting up effective meetings What’s communication like during a typical meeting? Our normal model is very linear – a whole series of these: This linear pattern derives from Claude Shannon...
I came across this question on Quora: “What are some drawbacks of visual thinking?” “Drawbacks”? It got me thinking… Dave Gray answered the question directly and objectively, emphasising the need to match the right tool...
So here’s another popular TED Talk (I don’t know why TED Talks so often start with “so”). The gist of it is that effective communication, especially storytelling, syncs our brains. So when you...
How to create intuitive categories: Ask “What does this look like, and where are the edges?” Last week I described how abstract content is easier to understand when it is divided into chunks that are “clear...
Fuzzy edges impede shared meaning Last week I talked about how numbering related concepts makes them feel more real than just listing them. When you hear about a list of “four elements of strategy”, or “four domains of...
