Suddenly, we’re surrounded. From internet-enabled speakers to just-in-time text messages to AI-powered bots of all flavors, we have daily interactions through conversational user interactions. And as with any technology in its infancy, many of those interactions are flawed. How do you begin to create well-designed conversational interactions that take into account both the intent and context?
Lessons from Boise: What colleges can teach us about fostering innovation
Students are natural idea generators. Exposed to new concepts, people, and settings, students are in a learning mindset and readily apply their minds to solving problems on campus, locally, and even globally. But how can campuses build on this natural inclination to help students take their ideas a step further?
Your project failed. Now what?
Failing once in a while is a good sign. While failure can certainly come from inattention or poor decision-making, it often is associated with experimentation and innovation. No one seeks out the sting of a failure and its repercussions, but smart professionals embrace failure as an opportunity to learn and improve.
Digital goes horizontal: challenges in the cultural sector
As educational and cultural institutions fight for relevance in an attention economy against a backdrop of an increasingly distrustful environment, taking digital horizontal is a C-suite imperative.
Do these five things to become a better mentee
“Work with a mentor” is right up there with “maximize your 401K contributions” and “no more than one drink at the office holiday party” on the list of common advice given to young professionals at the beginning of their careers. Harder to find are answers to questions such as, What is the best way to build a mentor relationship? How can you make the most of your interactions? And how can you sustain a meaningful connection over time?
The hardest problem in digital transformation
The real challenge is creating sustained cultural change: assembling and leading the right teams with the right mindset that work to build bridges within and beyond and organization, to implement successful transformative rather than incremental programs, and to disseminate learning and practice across the enterprise. In the end, it’s all about culture.
Friday 5 — 12.9.2016
Is Snapchat’s somewhat impenetrable experience design a feature and not a bug? Josh Elman explains the difference between intuitive design and shareable design. The latter reflects the deeply social nature of how humans learn, and capitalizes on people’s desires to learn and to teach. Just when I finally mastered NYC’s Whole Foods color-coded checkout lines, Amazon Go opened in …
Friday 5 — 10.21.2016
The Harvard Business Review launched a Slack bot to deliver insights from more than 200 best-practice articles, neatly chunked into do’s and don’ts (an editorial feat I don’t envy.) The bot will send you daily articles, and serves up related case and article links. What are the ethics around creating ever more addictive new digital experiences? The Atlantic explores …
Friday 5 — 10.14.2016
Amazon is taking another swing at streaming music, but this time with Alexa as its not-so-secret weapon. Will the hardware that’s insinuating itself into our home lives (and turning our tots into tyrants) make the difference? Alexa’s already done a good job making Siri seem dumb. No one ever sits you down to teach you how …
Friday 5 — 10.7.2016
Chatbots still have a long way to go, but Duolingo has identified a great application: bots for language learning. You might be embarrassed to try a new French word with a colleague, but a robot won’t judge. Not yet, anyway. A recent release of the Facebook Messenger app has enabled end-to-end encryption, which is a fancy way …