Steve Fenton

As ancient fables go, The Boy Who Cried Wolf is certainly one of the big ones. For those who haven’t yet heard it, well done! Teachers love to tell this story in an attempt to instruct students on morals, though this is misguided as the story may increase a child’s propensity to lie (NurtureShock: New […]

Following on from my article on working with public coronavirus data where I calculated the original peak in the UK to have been an estimated 50,000 cases per day (not the recorded 6,000 cases per day)… the most common follow up questions (aside from predictions on what will happen next) are about timings. What is […]

The full title of this article should really be “Increase Productivity by Quantifying Simple Tasks; Protect Complex Task Productivity by Not Quantifying It”. This is the result of a study by Aruna Ranganathan, co-authored by Alan Benson, that studied workers in a garment factory and I’ve added my opinion because sometimes I’m a narcissist like […]

Full credit to Geoffrey Moore, whose seminal Crossing the Chasm keeps proving to be a useful book thirty years after it was written. Credit also to Hans Baumhardt who introduced me to the book and who critically shaped my thinking about work and life. What I hope do, now that the credits are over, is […]

Every organisation has to deal with this problem. It has been described in many different ways, including the famous quaductionism of “Urgent vs Important” to the simplicity of phrases like “firefighting”. Yes, it’s all those tasks that people seem to want now, which are stopping you from doing the real work. My analogy for this […]

The UK Government provides public datasets that can be used by the media or the public. One such dataset contains information collected for the Coronavirus pandemic and its impact on people living and working in the UK. The problem with this dataset, though, is that we weren’t able to record the data until after the […]

Having signed up the wait list for Hey, I received my invite and subsequently undertook a two-week trial. What happened next has changed how I interact with email forever. Although I may be repeating information that is already out there, I’m going to focus on a small number of features that let you change your […]

As some countries around the world lift restrictions following COVID-19 lockdowns, we can start to see the effects the lockdown will have on different companies and industries. From the data I have seen so far, the lockdown effect seems to divide organisations into three broad categories: winners, losers, and recoverees. Let’s look at what this […]

Half-human, half-bird; the sirens lured hapless sailors to their destruction. Your window could be doing the same to you in your new WFH set up. Over the years I have been responsible for several office redesigns. The most common trigger for me to wade in and start moving furniture is the location of desks in […]

Firstly, the list of the sampling issues with this experiment would mean a near-infinite scrollbar. The intention here is not to say that “this is what you will experience”. The purpose of this article is to show that annoying adverts make more money than subtle advertising; but that you should test how much more and […]