Systems Thinking

• Systems Archetypes- Places to intervene — An advantage with using systems archetypes as a problem solving methodology is that places to intervene in the system can be thought through and played with.
• Using system archetypes to shortcut problem solving — The use of systems thinking archetypes provide a powerful framework to approach problem solving.
• Complex Adaptive Systems — Simple Rules, Unpredictable Outcomes — The concept of managing through a series of simple rules is an intriguing one. Could magic in our organisations occur through less rather than more control?
• Towards a Circular Economy — Short of us finding a sustainable (and desirable!) way of leaving planet earth, our journey to a circular economy, over the long term has to be inevitable.
• Archetypes for organisational safety — Applying Systems thinking to better understand organisational safety
• Moving to an economy within the earths limits — Donut economics — Is it time to begin moving to a more sustainable model of running the world?
• Tools to understand and manage complexity — Nancy Leveson and STAMP
• The Flywheel Effect
  Exploring the power of simple reinforcing loops executed over time

Problem Solving

• Questions to get you unstuck… — A good question can be just the trick you need to remove the block and get things flowing again.
• Problem solving for Engineers — Meta Level Reference Guide
• A daily question practice
  The L.I.F.E questions to dig into curiosity
• What does easy look like?
• Probabilistic Thinking — Monte Carlo Analysis
• A System Mindset to improve your decision analysis as outlined by Safi Bahcall
• Problem Solving with Claude Shannon — A great mind of the 20th Century and his unique approach to problem solving.
• Theory of Constraints — The Goal — To maximise the production capacity of the system you need to maximise the throughput at the bottleneck.
• Serendipity and the Adjacent Possible — Why do many great ideas get discovered at almost the same time? How can you cultivate serendipity and move into the adjacent possible with your work?
• Positive Deviance and “Bright Spot” Analysis — When solving complex problems, it sometimes pays to start with what is working rather than figure out what is not…
• Utilising “Little’s Law” to drive your improvements through reduced variation — Improved quality, increased throughput and better recoveries. We can have it all if we understand and know how to reduce variation.
• Process Disasters — Are we learning from them? — Learning the lessons of previous process disasters is an important goal for process engineers working in heavy industry.
• Bayes — How Can you be less wrong? — Bayesean thinking is all about using the information around you to be less wrong.
• Problem Solving I — Problem Finding
• Problem Solving II — Framing your problem
• Problem Solving III — Design Tools for tackling your problem
• Problem Solving IV — Problem Management
• Problem Solving V — The Three Critical Gaps
• Integrative Thinking — Your approach to the world determines the options you see — Is your stance that of a conventional or integrative thinker?
• Integrative Thinking Problem Solving Process — Roger L. Martin — Roger L Martin’s book — “Creating Great Choices” gives us a systematic process to develop superior solutions when we face an either/or choice.
• The Thinking Process and Evaporation Clouds — There is no such thing as a real conflict, only unexamined assumptions

Communication

• Delivering Feedback — A terrific approach to delivering feedback from CEO and Founder of Talentism Jeff Hunter
• Communicating to yourself and others — Your Personal User Manual and other great tools — Why not simply tell people directly how you would like them to interact with you?
• How persuasive is your message? — How are people influenced in making decisions or changing their minds?
• Deductive, inductive and Abductive reasoning — Being effective, you need to be able to influence others to see your point of view. Understanding the different forms of structuring arguments can help you make a clearer case to those that matter.
• Success Skills for Engineers — Part 1 — Tell Me a Story — You are nothing without the ability to communicate clearly
• Success skills for Engineers — Part 2 — Clarity of Direction — A key part of effective communication is having a clear idea of where you are now and where you are headed. As the Cheshire cat replied to Alice when she asked for directions “if you don’t know where you are going then any road will get you there!”.
• Success skills for Engineers — Part 3 — A Winning Mindset — You can achieve what ever you like with the right mindset. This will help the tone of your communication and what you actually would like to communicate.
• Amazon’s Flipped meetings — No powerpoint slides at a meeting? SAY WHAAAAAT?
• Rubrics to Standardise how you measure workplace systems and performance — Can a rubric help you set a clear standard?
• Rule of Seven — a sales tip applied to engineering success — Applying a classic sales technique to improve your influence as an engineer
• Eponymous Laws and Principles — Memorable rules to live by
• The Master Algorithm — Understanding the main schools of machine learning algorithms
• Percolation models — wild fires, pandemics and extinctions One model helps to explain much of the natural world around us
• Remote working — learning together about the new world order — How to make this work?

Decision making

• Cognitive Bias’s
• Mental Models
• Sitting with the question…Don’t try to solve the problem immediately, especially if you are uncomfortable with not knowing the answer straight away…
• Boundaries of failure — Rasmussen’s model of how accidents happen.
• Plan continuation bias — We are so close, We may as well keep going… You may be suffering from “Get-there-itis”
• The OODA Loop — Getting ahead of your competition —
• Know your Domain — The Cynefin Framework
• The Secret to how Toyota Innovate — Set-Based Concurrent Engineering — Traditional design practice, tends to quickly converge on a solution. By contrast SBCE keeps many options in development in parrallel and consistently delivers superior results.
• Looking in the rear view mirror… — Are you aware of the hindsight bias you are applying to your reaction to events that happen in life?
• Making better decisions using MAP — A simple process to help avoid your cognitive bias’s when making decisions
• Are you open to being wrong? Intellectual humility, Dunning Kruger and foxes and hedgehogs… — It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
• Foxes and Hedgehogs and improving your decision making
• Helping people make better choices — Nudge Theory and Choice architecture — Can you make the default option one that nudges people towards better outcomes?
• Luck and reversion to the mean — Are you fully acknowledging the role luck is playing in the outcomes? Does a good outcome reflect your good skill, or did you just get lucky?
• Are the blinkers on when you make decisions? — Tunnel vision can stop you from considering all the options
• The Multi-Armed Bandit — to explore or exploit? — When faced with a decision to go with what you know or strike out in a new direction, which do you choose?
• Pre-Mortem — How to avoid disaster — A simple exercise in looking at what went wrong- before it does.
• A System Mindset to improve your decision analysis as outlined by Safi Bahcall

Design thinking, Agile and Lean

• Kanban your work — The Kanban method is in the Agile suite of tools that can help you visualise and prioritise work.
• Design thinking and lean startup concepts to make your team more agile. — A summary of some of the reference material I have found most useful in exploring design thinking and lean start-up concepts to get to the heart of the problem you are trying to solve
• Swarm Intelligence — Can managers develop simple rules to shape the behaviour of their organizations and replace rigid command-and-control structures?
• Hooked… How to build products that get used…
• KANO Model to understand your customer and better scope requirements — Understanding what will really impress your customers.
• Lean UX — A Summary from the Ground Floor — “Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve a customer’s problem.” Scott Cook
• Pretotyping — “Make sure you are building the right it before you built it right.”
• Don Norman and the design of everyday things — 7 rules that help to reduce errors and make the user experience more intuitive.
• KANO Model to understand your customer and better scope requirements — Understanding what will really impress your customers.
• The long view vs the short view When faced with a decision to go with what you know or strike out in a new direction, which do you choose?

Leadership

• Just because… How are you helping to develop people around you?
• Your Operating System-is it delivering ? — How can you begin to understand the Operating system of your organisation?
• Efficiency vs Robustness — Actually you might not want everything to be perfectly efficient…
• Knowledge Debt — Are you building debts you cant repay?
• Delivering success through intrinsic motivation — Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose — The secrets of intrinsic motivation to drive yourself and others
• The Irony of Automation — Many significant process incidents are a result of the crossover of failed automation with human operators unable to take over at short notice
• Normalisation of Deviance — Normalisation of deviance is a trap in human psychology that has led to many disasters over the years
• Building a culture of full disclosure — How does a work place culture allow people to speak up, highlight important issues and opportunities to improve?
• Black Box Thinking... — Are you creating the environment and systems to be able to learn from your mistakes and improve…?
• System of Profound Knowledge — Deming developed his system of profound knowledge to describe the work of organisations.
• Delivering results by setting your objectives and key results — Results can be magnified through the alignment of everyone in the team.….
• Worst to Best — Lessons from NUMMI — The story of how the Toyota Production system turned around the worst car plant in North America
• Act your way to a new way of thinking — John Shook on turning around a culture — Change the way you think by building in structures that enable people to be successful.
• Let the Games Begin — Gamifying Learning — How we use games in the workplace both to improve learning and also to drive results.
• Antifragile — Becoming stronger with failure — Antifragile. A thought provoking concept developed by Nassim Taleb in a book by the same name.
• Organisational Silos and an alternate way to manage… — Can alternate organisational structure create more business value by busting through unproductive silo’s?
• Situational Awareness and the Hearts and Minds Safety Program — Safety is a constant topic of awareness in heavy industry — how to achieve a safe workplace and how do you create an environment that drives toward safety through the organisation?
• Culture and Change — What is culture and how do you build and nurture it?
• Action Centred Leadership — John Adair — What is the “best” way to create change in the world? Can you be more deliberate about your leadership style? John Adair’s Action Centred Leadership model provides an excellent base to improve.
• The Power of Moments — Sometimes the smallest moment can change everything. A word of encouragement, a smile, an unexpected offer of assistance. Is it possible to be more deliberate about creating these moments?
• Achieving Diversity — why being unbiased is not enough — Diversity is something we aspire to, but are we paying more than lip service to it? Are individual good intentions enough to achieve a diverse group setting, at work, socially or through the community?
• Survivorship Bias — We see this “Surviving” population as somehow special when in actual fact it might have got there through no more than sheer ass.
• Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter -Book by Liz Wiseman
• Appreciative Inquiry — Instead of looking for problems, what happens when you focus on what is working?
• Going up it’s hard work…. going down is bad luck — The myth of meritocracy
• Renewable Energy
• The 6D’s of Progress- Peter Diamandis explains how technology innovation progress through the 6D’s.
• Delivering Feedback — A terrific approach to delivering feedback from CEO and Founder of Talentism Jeff Hunter
• Remote working — learning together about the new world order — How to make this work
• Organisational Health Check — Some ideas to track critical health metrics for your team and organisation
• Failure demand vs Value Demand -Is churn created by “Failure Demand” impacting how you deliver value?
• Good Questions to Challenge the Priority of a Project — How confident is the team of success (really!)?
• People like us… — Do things like this…
• Safety Differently and The Principles of Human Performance — Workers are not the problem, workers are the problem identifiers
• Bases of power — Understanding where power and influence comes from
• Applying parenting lessons in the workplace — Leadership lessons from your kids
• Dice Game — Make more production — A simple production simulation game can provide great learning on how to optimise a production system.

Personal Development

• The 10x Engineer — A Tool kit of mental models — A comprehensive list of models and tools to 10x your engineering skills.
• A list of books you won’t regret reading
  Books I have read over the years that have left an impression, taught me valuable lessons
• Go hard from the front — You have to give yourself a chance to win…
• A trip to the tip and clearing the cruft… — How long do you take between trips to the tip? How much do you allow to accumulate before you clear out the cruft?
• The Path of Least Resistance — You may barely notice the underlying structures in your life and how powerfully and naturally they determine the way you live.
• Building star engineers
  Once you know the technical stuff, you are only just beginning…
• Double loop thinking
  Rather than repeatedly intervening at the tactical level, are your assumptions and mental models requiring an update?
• When Positive Thinking Won’t Get You There… — Is the constant advice to think positive really all that useful?
• Systems for learning — How to maximise your own learning and the learning of others through creating a learning system.
• The Helsinki Bus Theory — When to stick it out — Stay on the bus…
• You don’t learn to Juggle by learning to Juggle… — Throw. Throw. Catch. Catch. You don’t learn to juggle by learning to juggle — that is the outcome. You learn to juggle by learning to throw then learning to catch — that is the process.
• The art of influence — Trust and influence — tips to improve your effectiveness.
• ILOC, Bottlenecks and Procrastination — There is always something within your ownership and influence. This is the mindset of the Internal Locus of Control or ILOC.
• Until it sticks… Turning up every day… — Engineers can learn a lot from artists. Quality work over a career doesn’t come from chasing short term fires but rather the discipline of turning up every day and just starting.
• Systems for knowledge worker excellence — Todd Henry and Cal Newport regularly post on developing systems to use as knowledge workers to help you develop a creative rhythm and consistently deliver better work.
• Are you optimising to deliver value or look busy? — Today’s “always on” workplace makes it increasingly easy to do busy work. But is this allowing you to deliver important work?
• 2018 Resolutions
• New Years Prompts and Plans — Setting up the new year
• The Ship of Theseus — When does something cease to be original
• Pluralistic Ignorance — How sure are you that no one else shares your view?
• 3 Negotiating Tips From an FBI Pro — Ackerman Bargaining, Accusations audit and non-cash offers
• Life Implications of Exponential Growth — “If somebody describes the world of the mid-twenty-first century to you and it doesn’t sound like science fiction, it is certainly false. We cannot be sure of the specifics; change itself is the only certainty.” — Yuval Noah Harari
• Life lessons at the skate park — The surprising life lessons from some father/daughter time at the skate park

Productivity

• Delivering results by setting your objectives and key results
  Results can be magnified through the alignment of everyone in the team.
• A Checklist to save the world (or at least improve your own performance) — Checklists are the the way to stop making simple mistakes, and reduce your cognitive load saving energy for the decisions that really matter.
• Why your projects are never on time or budget…. the Planning Fallacy
• Scaling by doing things that don’t scale
  When focusing on the insane little details might be the secret to grand success
• Industry of the Future — Part 1 — The Office and Part 2 — the field — What does the future of work in the process industry look like. Lets explore some themes…

Best of Lists…

• My favourite links of 2017 — Part 1
• Best Books of 2018
• 15 of my Favourite Books in 2020
• Best of 2018 — Links that made me REALLY think
• My Favourite podcasts in 2019
• My favourite links from around the web 2020 — COVID
• My favourite links from around the web 2020 — Environment and net zero
• My favourite links from around the web 2020 — Getting better at work and random things of interest

• Best of 2018