October 4, 2021
The underlying problems with the way we think about work
An idea that has never really gone away, but which seems to be enjoying a new lease of life is the tabula rasa. The conception of people as a blank slate is something a that has crept back into mainstream political and social thought for a variety of reasons. Arguably, it is also behind many of the most misleading notions about work and workplace design, perhaps most importantly that a change to some single element or characteristic of a working environment will lead to a specific outcome in the behaviour of people. More →
I recently stumbled upon the phrase epistemic trespass, which describes the phenomenon of people making judgements in fields in which they have no expertise. I came across it as it was used to explain the sudden explosion of opinions about Afghanistan from a hitherto unknown horde of experts. Which may or may not be the same horde that has been so very certain about immunology and public health during the pandemic. It’s an old idea and one that needs to be treated with care, for reasons set out by Noah Smith 
Growth in key tech sectors is set to rocket after a landmark $1 trillion infrastructure package bill passed in the US Senate, part of a comprehensive $3.5 trillion plan within President Biden’s post-COVID 
The past year and a half should have served as a reminder of that tragic, unchangeable feature of the human condition, best expressed by Kierkegaard, that we are doomed to live our lives forwards but only understand them backwards. Retrospect is particularly important when we look back on sudden, large changes that knock us off our normal path. A taxonomy of change has emerged in recent years to describe such events. The best known is the ‘Black Swan’, coined and popularised by Nassim Taleb as things that “seem to us, on the basis of our limited experience, to be impossible” but which happen anyway, have a major impact and are often rationalised later. 
There’s a scene in the 1986 horror movie The Fly in which Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) persuades the reporter Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) to try two steaks, one of which Brundle has just sent between two teleportation pods in an effort to work out why they can’t process organic matter, including the organic matter belonging to a very unfortunate baboon. 
I recently read an interesting little book called 
Workplace Insight and 
When people first started working from home in large numbers for the first time in the Spring of 2020, one of the most talked about issues was how the productivity of most stayed the same or improved. This shouldn’t have been that surprising given all that we have learned about remote and flexible working over the years, but it certainly drove the debate for a while. 
September 30, 2021
The truth about the workplace comes out of the well
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Property, Technology, Wellbeing, Workplace design