Category: Insights

  • RC Sport Paddles Review

    RC Sport Paddles Review

    One of the best feelings imaginable is swimming fast – gliding through the water, cruising up and down a hotel pool after sunset, reaching with every stroke through the turquoise blue water and slicing through the glittering sunset yellow reflections, tumble-turning, pushing off the wall and cruising yet more… The performance paddles were built for…

  • The Heroine’s Journey

    If it’s true what the cognitive neuroscientists say that story and myths inform you about what to do when you don’t know what to do, then stories are fundamental to decision-making under uncertainty, and that the brain relies on micro-narratives to deal with combinatorially explosive complexity of everyday life, let alone chaos. And so, as they…

  • Patterns of behaviour (from child to parent)

    Something I noticed when I first started living together with my partner was that there was a clash of certain ways of doing things / approaches or principles, even though we had similar cultures and similar belief systems. It often baffled me how we could be so different on such things. Only now do I…

  • The Vagina Stone

    Once I was on the beach. It was a fairly cool summers day and my daughter and I were searching for pebbles that looked like eggs. One of the stones stood out and had the word ‘vagina’ written on it. It was amusing and I picked it up. Holding it, I could kind of imagine…

  • The Distant B&W Past

    Growing up, the past seemed so far away. There were black and white images of this period before, especially images from the Second World War. The past seemed so distant in my mind. Due to the lack of colour, it appeared awful. I was glad that I didn’t live during that period. But most of…

  • Feeling the Timeless

    I’m sitting next to a fireplace on Christmas Eve, a time to reflect. I notice that there must have been quite some effort to install the iron fireplace and its chimney into the wall. I’m reminded that Klaus did that. Klaus was one of Dad’s best friends and now I’m staying in the flat that…

  • A Tough Lesson about Incentives

    I found this line very interesting in a recent conversation with Dominic Cummings when he related his experience of working in Russia: “I also learned about incentives a lot. So everything I had to do with the airline was a total fiasco. And one of the things I figured I learned was — I, like…

  • A Lasting Quality

    “If you want to preserve a building, you will try to make it in materials which last and last forever. You will try to make sure that this creation can be preserved intact, in just its present state, forever. Canvas must be ruled out because it has to be replaced; tiles must be so hard…

  • Types of Freedom

    We’ve often talked about freedom – freedom is when you are able to do the things you want to do. Having options and having choices.  I heard about another type of freedom. A female comedian interviewed in the radio recently was asked what freedom meant to her and she said it was being able to…

  • Antifragile Metrics

    For some time I’ve been thinking about metrics for antifragility. I first came across Troy Magennis’s framework: the ‘Six Dimensions of Team Performance” (perhaps worth reading first) and remember thinking at the time that his framework was fairly close to describing an antifragile system already. I thought I’d have a go at modifying it and…