I wrote last year about the depressing case of the victims of the Royal Mail Horizon scandal, innocent subpostmasters who were prosecuted, fined, and even imprisoned on the basis of evidence from a faulty IT system.
One of the factors that enabled the scandal is something that exists in many organisations: the fact that those at the top of the organisation had a very different view of reality to those at the bottom.
If you’ve got a gap like that in your organisation, what can you do about it? The manufacturing world has the answer, it turns out.
This week’s article
Doing the genba walk
There’s a feature of many organisations in which those at the top know far less about what’s going on than those at the bottom – with sometimes disastrous consequences. But there’s a cure for it, too.
Click here to read the article »
This week’s three interesting links
Google Slides is Actually Hilarious
As someone who spends roughly half their day raging at Google Slides, this was truly traumatic:
“Perhaps like you, I naively started out thinking that Google Slides was just a poorly maintained product suffering from some questionable foundational decisions made ages ago that worshipped at the shrine of PowerPoint and which have never since been revisited, but now, after having had to use it so much in the past year, I believe that Google Slides is actually just trolling me.
…
“Join me on this cathartic journey which aspires to be none of the following: constructive, systematic, exhaustive. I’m too tired for that, dear reader. Consider this a gag reel. A platter of amuse-bouches. A chocolate sampler box of nightmares.”
The Changing Room Illusion
A fascinating optical illusion; even when you know what you’re expecting, it still works.
It reminds me of the “selective attention test” by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, but for me at least that effect stops working once you’re aware of it. #
Abuse and harassment on the blockchain
Molly White, creator of the fantastic web3 is going just great, explains what seemingly no one else has: the potential for abuse that blockchain/crypto/web3 projects have baked into their technology. It’s concerning stuff, but this lack of regard for the abusive potential of technology is sadly common in the tech world:
“‘How will this technology be used to harass and abuse people?’ is a form of that question that too often goes unasked, particularly given that the demographics of people who are most at risk for abuse and harassment tend to be underrepresented in the industry. Apple apparently didn’t put much thought into how its AirTag location tracking discs could be misused by stalkers and domestic abusers. Target didn’t realize how its attempts to market to expectant mothers might out pregnant teenagers to their families. Slack didn’t foresee how people might use its invitation feature to send people harassing messages they couldn’t block.”