In week notes this week, reflections on the value of continuous discovery habits for universities making online courses; the fascination of dissonance between present reality and future tech trajectories; and a minor personal milestone.
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‘You looking at me?’ Why higher education needs to discover product discovery
‘Engagement’ needs to be redefined, with institutions as the subject, not learners. Institutions need to engage, not learners. Higher education needs a product mindset restart. This has never been more important. Just look at our record: 10 plus years of fads (MOOCs), hallucinations (microcredentials), triviality (badges) and general failure to bring meaningful, credible new products that meet learners’ needs in this challenging contemporary world.
Week note: 5 June 2023
So I’m resuming week notes a few years after stopping due to time and other pressures while working on an intense work assignment.
I’m aiming to reflect on books, ideas, projects, experiences and interesting things happening in domains of interest to me including education, technology and especially XR and AI, innovation and (social) enterprise, change and transformation, facilitation, and outside interests like art and cycling.
ChatGPT and friends
Yesterday (23 March 2023) I attended a KnowledgeMakers workshop organised by KMi (Knowledge Media Institute) at The Open University in Milton Keynes titled ‘ChatGPT and Friends: How Generative AI is Going to Change Everything.’
Google introduces NeRF 3D to Maps
Google has begun to roll out Immersive View, using advances in AI and computer vision to fuse billions of Street View and aerial images, to create a immersive, digital model of the world with local data layered on. Immersive View combines 360 video with neural radiance fields (NeRF), an advanced AI technique, transforming ordinary pictures …
Why do scaleups shed diversity?
Over time I have noticed that as startups scale up, the teams become less diverse. Why is this, and can it be prevented? Higher education has a problem with diversity and particularly in attracting applicants from Black, Asian and other minority communities. This is well documented. But in my experience of internal (corporate) startups over …
Responses in chaos
How do we respond in chaos? In this post I reflect on my experience of witnessing response patterns of individuals and groups in the aftermath of the collapse of Stalinism in Albania in the early 1990s, patterns which I have observed in the intervening decades in business and organisations, even in my own family, when …
The discovery mindset
The discovery mindset is the mindset we need for successful living in a complex world Discovery is the mindset we need to create and launch new products and services. And discovery is the mindset we need to sustain successful interventions in human complex systems such as organisations, and when attempting business change. Discovery helps us …
Small is not always beautiful
Small, cross-functional teams are the essence of agility. Many organizations are now experimenting with or reorganizing around multi-skilled product teams, or Spotify-style ‘squads’ and ‘tribes’, often with fantastic results. But the transition is not always easy. In this post, I summarise some of my experience of what to look for to avoid problems and how …
‘A single version of the truth’
I have noticed this phrase several times recently, in the context of systems implementations in large organizations: ‘a single version of the truth’. It refers to an affordance and anticipated benefit of the proposed new systems. The new systems (it is claimed) will improve the quality and reliability of management information, and (it is implied) …
Matthew Moran 