John W Lewis

Category: modelling

  • Communicating context and meaning

    Recently, Mark Jennings posed an important question: “Do words mean the same to say as to hear?” Much of this subject is, I believe, quite well understood by people involved in communication theory and, particularly, in organizational communication. There are experts on this subject: the person from whom I have learnt most of the following…

  • Less is more manufacturing productivity

    Recollections of an memorable project Thinking about the concept of “less is more”, takes me back to a small and initially unpromising project that a maverick boss of mine persuaded me to get involved in many years ago. It provides an interesting example of counter-intuitive optimisation. The scene… There was a manufacturing plant which produced…

  • Social relationship management

    So Twitter and LinkedIn are interconnecting. What is the background to this and where is it leading? Twitter Twitter seems to have caught many people’s mindshare because it is fundamentally different from most other services; its asymmetric “follower” relationship is more complex and flexible than simple connections on LinkedIn or friends on Facebook. Other services…

  • Learning and social networks

    My interest in learning, and in the ways in which we can enable it, makes conversations like this really interesting. This is my (very rapidly composed) take on it. I write it here because my intended comment in that conversation grew in size so fast that, before I could get it out, it seemed to…

  • Things counter-intuitive

    “That makes no sense!” … “How can that possibly work?” … “There is no way that I am trying that! Are these the kinds of comments you have heard from beginners at … well anything that they consider “counter-intuitive”?

  • Architectural advice

    O’Reilly are publishing a new book “97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know”. This caught my attention for a variety of reasons. One is an interest in trying to get to the bottom of what the issues commonly labelled as “software architecture” are really all about! Another reason is that there are a couple of…

  • Controlling the sequence of learning

    A post from Brett McLaughlin on the O’Reilly Radar blog poses questions about the control of the learning sequence.

  • Learning sequences

    Over many years, as an instructor of training courses, my recognition of the importance of the sequence in which we learn things has been continually increasing. Every time there is a problem with someone learning something, the starting point is the sequence. As we guide learners through the process of opening the Pandora’s box