The threshold problem - understanding invisible barriers
Every system makes sense to the people who built it. The question is whether it makes sense to the people who haven't crossed into it yet - and whether you'd even know if it didn't.
Topic
ways of thinking
A collection of 87 issues
This week's best things #89
Software design's joyless sameness, screens hollowing out cities, Liberating Structures' new pathfinder, bloated homepages, Meta/YouTube's addiction liability verdict, Spotify's prompted playlists, and the British public's finest storm name suggestions.
This week's best things #88
SLAs for content teams, "deliberately generous" facilitation rules, what digital organisations actually look like, the BoM redesign post-mortem, Meta's encryption retreat, and a bumper UX guidelines roundup.
What mushrooms, ghosts, NASA, and a 19th century economist can show us about hidden labour
Ideas borrowed from mycology, aerospace, economics, and agriculture to explore the issue of hidden labour
This week's best things #87
Swedish sun-worshipping, museum visitor research, AI uncertainty, attention economics, the gap between digital and physical worlds, UX patterns, hidden labour interviews, an island without time, and my 2026 reading list to date.
This week's best things #86
Friction vs convenience, AI scepticism, “workslop” and unclear AI mandates, Gall’s Law and complexity, organisational change and conversation, invisible digital infrastructure work, accessibility design, cultural projects, train punctuality data, and the value of weirdness.
This week's best things #84
A mix of indie web oddities, creative projects, research on leadership, tools to dodge AI slop, and how AI safety features can be circumvented with poetry. Also some reflections on audio design, leadership dynamics, a design system from the Swedish state railway, and a recipe for clotted cream
How organisations lose what they learn - the half-life of discovery insights, and how myths sneak into our digital work
Insight in cultural organisations tends to expire, disappear, or turn into myth. A few simple routines can keep learning visible and help teams make decisions based on what is true now rather than what used to be true.
This week's best things #83
A call for participants for a digital decision-making pilot, plus pieces on BoM’s troubled rebuild, leadership habits, 2026 trends, digital luxury, Theory X and Y, platform safety, judicial overreach, AI notetaker risks, and some thoughts on imagination and resilience.
Imagination, resilience and letting go
Organisations face accelerating pressure and shrinking capacity. Imagination matters, but it needs scaffolding, stability, and space to take root. Real progress comes from better conditions for decision making, small experiments, and structures that turn ideas into sustainable practice.