There is a natural human psychology for consolidation over exploration. Inherently we can feel that successes are something to be protected, perhaps to build on, but never to take risks with. This is a easy mindset to develop, but why is it dangerous? At first glance, there are many positive aspects, especially for close-horizon time scales. But across longer periods of time, the negatives significantly outweigh those positives. We find ourselves favouring entrenchment over mobility, and change…

Our technology growth has taken us on a fantastic journey. Inside of the last 25 years we have gone from wired phones in our houses, to powerful computers strapped to our wrists. We can transfer money across to the other side of the world in fractions of a second. Whole autonomous organisations can be contructed from smart contracts that live distributed across the digital world. I can authenticate to my bank through facial recognition. My favourite websites know me better than I know myself,…

As the pace of progress within existing markets increases year on year there are both new opportunities and substantial challenges to the successful and established companies across many industries. One of the key pathways through this modern landscape is often summed up in the all-encompassing term ‘Digital Transformation’. The definition varies depending on who you ask, but broadly speaking is a mix of modernisation of IT infrastructure and movement to more Agile methodologies. In…

One of the most common challenges as businesses transform more of their traditional capabilities into digital ones is the breadth and depth of the change itself. Core changes to the organisational structure, processes, and culture. The functional components and interactions of these aspects of a large organisation help to define what we mean when we talk about complex systems. But it is also when we look through the lens of complex systems that we can get a different vision of change. Seeing it…

If anything defines the business landscape in the modern world over the last few years it is the increasing sophistication of technology, the ever-quickening pace, complexity, scale of data, and dropping of costs. The power of the tools now available to organisations is incredible. With one click we can add massive data lakes, machine learning, and personal AI assistants, let alone the day-to-day underlying traditional compute uses we are more familiar with. What also seems clear however is that…