One challenge I see all types of organisations struggling with is identifying and understanding their audiences. Sometimes the question ‘who is your target audience and what can you tell me about them?’ is met with an awkward silence. While we’ve never had so much information about our audiences, we still seem to know so little about them. This is a...
I was travelling for work recently and had a really interesting conversation with a stranger (over wine of course!) about our views on work and how we’re trying to raise our families. I mentioned that I think it’s really important for kids to help clean the house and to get a casual job as soon as possible so they can learn the value of money and the...
Last week I heard a conference panellist describe herself as ‘a self-taught engineer’. Meanwhile the writer Sarah Wilson and chef Pete Evans were once again paraded on TV as experts in health. It is infuriating. What will happen to us, when bona fide experts such as scientists, doctors, engineers, criminal profilers and so on are no longer sought for...
I worked on a project not so long ago that involved conducting in-depth qualitative interviews with around 15 people in an attempt to get the nub of the problem we were trying to solve. In presenting our findings, a summary of the themes of our conversations, we were asked: “This is all great, but do you have any quantitative data around what you heard?”...
I’ve been concerned for a while now that words like ‘innovation' and ‘entrepreneurship’ are being thrown around with reckless abandon in Australia, yet the serious work required to create something truly valuable seems rarely understood. Last month, I travelled to Israel as part of an Innovation Mission organised by the Trans-Tasman Business...