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Know that it's possible

Oct 2024 · Knowing what things are possible is often more important than knowing how to do the things yourself. Science and invention focuses on expanding our collective knowledge of what is possible, but for those advances to truly be applied, we need to personally know what is possible.

Tags: education, personal development

Don’t make bad diagrams

Jun 2024 · Professional reports are littered with bad diagrams. What’s a bad diagram? A diagram that exists for no good reason, that adds nothing of value for the reader, or worse makes things harder for them.

Tags: corporate culture, document formatting

Less is more: reducing maths in schools

Jul 2022 · We make maths compulsory from ages 5 to 16 and despite this we fail to teach basic mathematical literacy, and instead waste countless hours forcing students to learn maths that they do not need or want to learn. I propose a radically different approach: dramatically reducing the amount of maths in schools.

Tags: education

The mystery of Etsy’s map

Jul 2022 · Etsy has sent 26 million emails to UK customers over the last four years, all containing the same error. Why?

Tags: corporate culture, misc

Company values

Jun 2022 · Most company values are meaningless and worthless. They are too often generic adjectives which serve little purpose. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Values can be useful tools which help organisations make decisions and strengthen their culture.

Tags: corporate culture

The Overton window of personal identity

May 2022 · The Overton window is the range of political ideas that are acceptable in mainstream society at a given time, shaped by millions of individual interactions. Similarly there is an Overton window of what it is to be me, and what I can reasonably change.

Tags: personal development

What makes a good risk register?

May 2022 · A good risk register is a valuable tool for managing risk, but too often they are crude facsimiles of useful documents made without any consideration for what purpose they might serve or how they might be structured to best achieve that purpose.

Tags: corporate culture

On gift giving

Apr 2022 · Giving good gifts is hard, and by and large I think people do a terrible job of it. Our societal norms around gift giving lead to worse outcomes than if we broke them and focused on giving good gifts instead.

Tags: misc

Three purposes for education

Mar 2022 · If you live a median life in the UK then it is very likely that you will spend as much as a quarter of your life in education of one sort or another. What is it all for? Education should, I think, have three purposes: work, citizenship, and transcendence.

Tags: education

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