PEG – Trying to understand the intersection between business and technology

The secret of our species’ success resides not in the power of our individual minds, but in the collective brains of our communities. Our collective brains arise from the synthesis of our cultural and social natures—from the fact that we readily learn from others (are cultural) and can, with the right norms, live in large and widely interconnected groups (are social). The striking technologies that characterize our species […] emerge not from singular geniuses but from the flow and recombination of ideas, practices, lucky errors, and chance insights among interconnected minds and across generations.

— From Chapter 1, “A Puzzling Primate”, in “The Secret of our Success” Henrich, Joseph Patrick. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton University Press, 2016.

Flourishing in ambiguity

by peg2023-02-022023-02-02 No Comments

We have a new essay published by Deloitte Insights, Flourishing in ambiguity, a collaboration between C4tE and the Deloitte Human Capital team. In a somewhat oblique way this builds on Strategy and the art of the possible by teasing out the idea that you need to act to decide in a complex and rapidly evolving environment rather than decide to act, as is our usual predilection.

How tax can help untangle the Gordian sustainability knot

by peg2023-01-312023-01-31 No Comments

We have a new essay published in Deloitte Insights, How tax can help untangle the Gordian sustainability knot, a collaboration between C4tE and the tax team at Deloitte. The essay emerged from conversations about how tax teams want to do more to support sustainability, but it’s not clear what to do as the team’s day-to-day operations have little impact their organisations sustainability footprint. What we realised is that tax is in a unique position to help untangle the gordian knot of sustainability.

Why hasn’t AI delivered on it’s promise?

by peg2022-12-212022-12-21 No Comments

We have a new essay published on Deloitte Insights, Why hasn’t AI delivered on its promise?, a collaboration between the Centre for the Edge and and the AI Institute. This time we’re smashing together the ideas from The real landscape of technology-enabled opportunity and Reconstructing jobs to see if they can help us understand why, despite recent advances in AI, adoption seems to be lacking.

How industries evolve

by peg2022-08-092022-12-08 No Comments

We have a new essay published in Deloitte Insights, How industries evolve: Interactions, not institutions, drive disruptive change, a collaboration with Damien Crough from prefabAUS. This essay builds on the observation in The real landscape of technology-enabled opportunity. that disruption is typically the result of the accumulation of many minor innovations, rather than being driven by some significant disruptive innovation, by showing how industries evolve when the verbs change (how organisations in the industry interact) rather than the nouns (disruption of the organisations themselves).

Strategy and the art of the possible

by peg2022-07-072022-07-12 No Comments

We have a new essay published by Deloitte Insights, Strategy
and the art of the possible. This essay is the result of us pulling together a few threads that we’d been exploring in other areas. The most recent of these was Negotiating the digital-ready organisation, where we explored the idea of thinking about the digital workplace in terms of three interrelated ecosystems: the human, place and digital. One could view this essay as the intersection of that ecosystems view with idea of the extended mind that has been popping up in quite a bit of our other work—such as being one of the underlying themes in our recent series on creativity in business.

Investing in creative potential

by peg2022-05-042022-06-10 1 comment

We have a new essay published by Deloitte Insights, Investing in creative potential. This essay is the third in our series on creativity in business, and explores how a firms leader’s invest to improve the firm’s creativity. The challenge that there is more to creativity than individual skill, and so simply training staff in some creativity technique (such as design thinking) will do very little to improve creativity. We need a more holistic approach.

Negotiating the Digital-Ready Organization

by peg2022-03-302022-06-10 1 comment

We have a new essay published by Deloitte Insights, Negotiating the digital-ready-organisation, a collaboration with Alex Bennett at NTT. This builds on our previous work on the transition to working digitally, Reconstructing the workplace, by trying to imagine what this future workplace might look like.

The real landscape of technology-enabled opportunity

by peg2022-03-022022-06-10 1 comment

We have a new essay published by Deloitte Insights, The real landscape of technology-enabled opportunity, where we look at how technology disrupts markets and society, creating opportunity.

Setting the stage for creative performance

by peg2021-11-032022-12-08 No Comments

We have a new essay published by Deloitte Insights, Setting the stage for creative performance.> This essay is the follow-on to Unshackling the creative business from a couple of months ago.