Author: Phil Bennett
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Slack: The Infernal Noise Machine.
I am now certain that Slack is the worst thing that has happened to the workplace since the misappropriation of Herman Miller’s Action Office concept, which birthed cubicles. Slack is a noise machine. Slack is not one of those nice noise machines that play relaxing bird noises, or calming…
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Default Hugger? The Complexities of Social Greetings.
Hold on tight (not literally); this one will be a little off-piste, but it has some vague relation to the workplace. But there’s been something on my mind for a while. I’m not sure this is really a problem for anyone else, but as an introverted, slightly socially awkward,…
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If You’re an Engineer, You Need to Get Better. Quickly.
Both of my parents were Software Engineers. When I was younger, they did nothing to pressure me into following their career path. They might have dropped a few light triggers into my lap in the form of a ZX Spectrum computer, a very early home computer, when I was very…
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The Confessions of an Eternal Creative Tinkerer.
Much to the chagrin of my partner, I’m an obsessive creative tinkerer. Not in the sense that I creatively tinker with technology, but I constantly tinker with other types of creativity. I am a published poet of a single poem. I have performed live on stage playing the…
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Intentionally Hybrid vs Accidentally Hybrid.
For anyone following along, you’ll notice tech companies are having a wild ride working out what the future of their work policy looks like. Some are moving towards bringing people back to the office, some are moving to fully remote and binning the expensive costs of the office,…
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Human Protectionism In The Defence Against Artificial Intelligence.
AI won’t take your job and won’t significantly impact the number of jobs people can access. Not because it can’t; looking at the rapid progress we are making with the technology, it’s easy to predict it replacing many types of employment. It won’t take your job simply because…
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GPT-4 might be the peak of human creativity. But not in a good way.
Maybe I’m a neo-Luddite, but I’m worried we’re close to the peak of human creativity, and it’s the fault of ‘creative’ AI like ChatGPT and DALL-E. Ironically this boom in AI generative creativity makes me think of the closing scenes of DALL-Es name inspiration, WALL-E, where the humans…
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Is your Organisation a Pencil or a Diamond? Individual Strength vs Social Strength.
About ten years ago, I was part of a founding team for a product way before its time (said like everyone with a failed start-up). A no-code solution that would allow small businesses to deploy simple mobile apps without any technical knowledge. It was a great idea with a great…
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Clumps of Stars: The Importance of Group Level Direction.
The sometimes hard-to-swallow truth is that, at scale, flat organizations don’t work. As a company grows they need to be chunked into smaller, more manageable pieces. Companies split up into domains, groups, tribes, coagulations, or what is defined in the most recent blog post or book that the operations lead…
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“Hybrid is Hard” – Survey Full Results.
After talking to multiple people I started to feel that there was a significant trend toward people feeling that Hybrid work, spending some time working from home, and sometime in the office, wasn’t really playing out to be the perfect post-COVID “new normal” scenario that people were anticipating. Research…
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“Hybrid is Hard” – Your Back To The Office Plan is Failing.
Most of us have received the email. The title reads “Back To The Office Policy” it starts with something like “We all believe that face-to-face collaboration is part of creating a vibrant, fun, and effective work policy.”.” The internal comms team knows this isn’t going to be 100% popular, so…
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“Hybrid is Hard” – The Myth of The Collaborative Workplace.
We’ve been sold the myth that hybrid work is the perfect mix between being productive and being focused in your curated, comfortable home office space. Then spending a day or two in the office being hyper-collaborative with your teammates. However, my recent survey shows that 60% of hybrid workers…