The Yak Collective’s Writings
2024
April
: Benjamin Taylor, I’ll always remember overhearing a conversation between three street drinkers, on a bench on Kilburn High Road, piles of cans of Special Brew around them.
March
: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, The Curiosity Conflict: Why we Struggle to Shift from Exploration to Exploitation
: Benjamin Taylor, Thank you! To all our customers and our peers who, once again, made the effort to the Financial Times and Statista survey of the top UK management consultancies, and put RedQuadrant amongst that list.
February
January
: Benjamin Taylor, A Doctor is one of the closest things to a King or Queen we encounter in UK public services. How much power do you think they actually have?
2023
December
: Benjamin Taylor, Partnerships in the ‘safe zone’ are the least productive and the most at risk of exploding in conflict. Do you recognise this dynamic?
November
: Benjamin Taylor, The joke often goes that managers pick up the hashtag#OperationalExcellence bible and flip through the chapters: hmmm ‘Create Flow’? Sounds confusing… what else we got? ‘Pull at the rate of demand’? Ok, ok, whatever that means…. ‘Remove Waste’! Aha! THAT
: Benjamin Taylor, We fear rejection like we fear death. It’s the fear of being abandoned by the tribe, left to survive on our own
October
: Benjamin Taylor, I’m interested in the systems thinking | complexity | cybernetics field because I’m always looking…
September
August
: Benjamin Taylor, We put as much thought into our learning design and delivery as we do into content at the The…
: Paul Millerd, Living Intentionally After “Enough” – Bilal Zaidi on leaving Google, emigrating to the US, the intensity of New York, writing poetry and spoken word, and travel vs. vacations (Pathless Path Podcast)
July
: Paul Millerd, Kyla Scanlon on the Passion Crisis, Vibecession, and Quitting Her Job To Bet On Herself | The Pathless Path Podcast
: Paul Millerd, Aida Alston: College at 16, Med School in Cuba & Starting Over After Kids | The Pathless Path Podcast
: Paul Millerd, Luke Burgis on Mimetic Desire, The Three City Problem & Academia | The Pathless Path Podcast
: Paul Millerd, Why Sheryl Sandberg is Wrong — Dawn Baker on The Art of “Leaning Out” | The Pathless Path Podcast
June
: Paul Millerd, Goofing Off On Purpose – Kevin Kelly on owning his time, staying optimistic about the future, raising children, and his new book Excellent Advice for Living | The Pathless Path Podcast
May
April
March
February
January
2022
December
: Paul Millerd, David Perell on The Scripts of School and Becoming an Internet Citizen | The Pathless Path Podcast
November
: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Use timeboxing to regain calmness and control with Marie Ng, founder of Llama Life
October
: Benjamin Taylor, Is it the best album ever, or did you just hear it first between the ages of 14 and 24?
: Benjamin Taylor, What are your #antimetrics — things which, simply measuring them, make things worse?
: Benjamin Taylor, RedQuadrant is seeking a consulting management trainee with two years’ consultancy and/or public…
: Paul Millerd, The “Wild Problem” Of A Life Well Lived: A Book Review of Russ Roberts’ Wild Problems
September
: Paul Millerd, Selling My Time Too Cheap: How Full-Time Year-Round Work Blinds Us To The Joys of Life
: Paul Millerd, The Inspiration Deficit – Or Why So Many Young People Still Crave More Challenging Work
August
July
: Paul Millerd, Malcolm Ocean on Rationality, Goals, Self-Awareness & Motivation as a Self-Employed Entrepreneur
: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Creating scalable knowledge spaces with Heiko Haller, co-founder of Infinity Maps
: Paul Millerd, Sky King on Growing up in Hawaii, Quitting to Work At a Smoothie Bar & Building The Future of Podcasts (The Pathless Path Podcast)
: Paul Millerd, Lauren Razavi on Digital Nomads and The Future of Global Mobility & Digital Citizenship (The Pathless Path Podcast)
June
: Paul Millerd, Lawrence Yeo On The Arc of The Practical Creator, Creativity & Finding Work That Matters (The Pathless Path Podcast)
May
: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Building an extension of your mind with Tobias van Schneider, co-founder of mymind
: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Planning your intentions and ambitions with Ashutosh Priyadarshy, founder of Sunsama
: Benjamin Taylor, systems change, convening, practice, leadership, sustainability, chat… SIX systems events coming up…
: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Control your time to free your mind with Nunzio Martinello, founder of Akiflow
April
: Nathan Acks, ITPro.TV: CompTIA Security+ (SY0-601) & TryHackMe: Jr. Penetration Tester (Supplements)
: Benjamin Taylor, What do you do when you need to get yourself going — when you’re short on motivation?
March
: Paul Millerd, Unlocking your creative engine: How to create a virtuous cycle for creating and sharing online
February
: Benjamin Taylor, Why is being in the wrong frame so hilarious? And what are the implications for business?
: Benjamin Taylor, Have you seen data, ‘best practice’, benchmarking, or ‘learning’ applied in ways which block…
: Benjamin Taylor, Do you know a trainer, facilitator, or consultant — and how do they feel about their job?
: Benjamin Taylor, Your help needed — Supporting Adult Social Care Commissioners — Strategic Commissioning Options…
: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Exploring the power of augmented intentionality with Welf von Hören, founder of Potential
January
: Benjamin Taylor, Can you see the courtly rituals still at work in our organisations and management?
: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Fostering authentic relationships in distributed teams with the co-founder of Remotion
: Benjamin Taylor, Thriving in the space of service — for consultants, coaches, facilitators, business partners…
: Benjamin Taylor, When have you seen someone change their position — and suddenly change their perspective?
2021
December
: Benjamin Taylor, When leaders have no idea of the real-life experience of their service, finding out can be a hell…
: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Designing a better reading experience with Ben Springwater, co-founder of Matter
: Benjamin Taylor, What do you think of each other? How dangerous would it be if everyone knew? A partnership exercise
November
: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Building a social knowledge base with Dmitriy Fabrikant, founder of Knovigator
: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Take control over your smartphone usage with Jorn Rigter, co-founder of Unpluq
: Benjamin Taylor, What are you working hard to achieve in life, where the ‘working hard’ is self-defeating?
October
: Benjamin Taylor, The traffic lights will kill us all one day — unless the watermelons get us first.
: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Solving the biggest productivity bottleneck with Richie Bonilla, co-founder of Clarity
: Benjamin Taylor, How do you show respect and collect learning when involved in organisational change?
: Benjamin Taylor, Exploring practical systems change: why are we not learning all the lessons we could about fire…
September
: Benjamin Taylor, What Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera can teach us about organisations and…
: Benjamin Taylor, On 7–8 October I’m proud to be hosting an event that brings together 14 of the most incredible…
: Benjamin Taylor, “It is a misuse of our power to take responsibility for problems that belong to someone else.”
August
: Benjamin Taylor, The Peter Block Community Exercise — connection, gifts, community: better than ‘a warmup’
July
: Benjamin Taylor, This week I spoke at #leanagileUK on ‘five core practices’ for effective organisations
: Benjamin Taylor, what could the role of government and public services look like in the 21st Century and beyond?
June
: Benjamin Taylor, In world of infinite overlapping possibility and multiple, irreconcilable differences, what does…
May
: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Building an infinite canvas for your thoughts with Julia Pierce, Director at Scapple
: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Exploring the power of mind mapping with Michael Hollauf, co-founder of Meister
April
: Benjamin Taylor, We are all consultants, advisers, coaches, change people — but only a select few enter the tool…
March
: Benjamin Taylor, What do you reach for to get a quick overview of an organisation’s structure and key data?
: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, The mindful productivity audit: 10 questions to improve your well-being at work
: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Building the world’s most customizable workspace with Ivan Zhao, co-founder of Notion
: Benjamin Taylor, We would all like a ‘neat and compleat’ way of making sense of the world, of leading, consulting…
February
: Benjamin Taylor, This intriguing image contains two possibilities for organisations, and the people who spend their…
January
: Benjamin Taylor, This is very true, and has generated some quite good comments on LinkedIn (where this blog is…
: Benjamin Taylor, Why is a bridge and water such a good explanation of how people go wrong with business…
: Benjamin Taylor, There are only seven ways to make savings and improvements in service organisations
: Benjamin Taylor, Are you a naive enthusiast, an oversimplifying populariser, a gooroo, or a curmudgeon?
: Benjamin Taylor, There are five core things which, if you make them your practice, are likely to lead to…
: Benjamin Taylor, Local public services in the UK face a ‘perfect’ storm — we need Adaptive Councils
: Benjamin Taylor, ‘the chick does not break the egg out of hatred for the shell — it does so out of a desire to walk…
: Benjamin Taylor, Are you playing the real human game, or are you being seduced by the Dark Side of The Force?
: Benjamin Taylor, The Force in organisational life: how dominant/other cultural patterns create system fragility…
2020
December
: Paul Millerd, Why Did People Stop Caring About Developing a Meaningful Philosophy of Life in the 1970s?
November
October
: Paul Millerd, Aspiration, Meaning, & The Traps of Ambition (A Book Review of Agnes Callard’s Aspiration)
September
: Benjamin Taylor, This is part 11 of my series on The Force in organisational life. The rest can be accessed here:
: Benjamin Taylor, Not 100# to your point, but this is a good nuanced take on '30-50 wild hogs' and failures of…
August
: Benjamin Taylor, - Here's the complete set of articles on The Force in organisational life, so far.
July
: Benjamin Taylor, Debora, please see the twitter thread started by Sonja Blignaut posting this: https://twitter.com/so
June
May
: Vinay Débrou, Case Study of Capgemini Invent: Making Crossdisciplinary Collaboration Work in a Large Corporation