Hello
This site is a blog/notebook. I spend a lot of time thinking and this is an attempt to write some of those thoughts down and develop them further. No promises that they will be correct, coherent, or self-consistent.
My posts have no overall theme to them, but some of my personal and professional interests that I have written or plan to write about include:
- Education and skills – ways to learn and teach more effectively, and to develop curricula, resources, and activities that better align with real world needs, particularly for the tech and space sectors
- Corporate culture – what good corporate culture looks like and how it can be created and maintained
- Recruitment – how to improve the experience of both candidates and recruiters, better attract and identify good candidates, and avoid bias (on this topic I usually post as part of my company’s Space Recruitment Toolkit)
- Software – how it can be used for good, facilitate new activities and new ways of thinking, and enable teams with limited resources to punch above their weight
- Personal development – ways to explore one’s identity, change habits and ways of thinking, and engage in the essential struggle of being human
Posts
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