The Yak Collective’s Writings
2024
January
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