John W Lewis

John W Lewis

Thinking, Understanding, and System modelling

  • An application of storytelling

    Practical storytelling What is storytelling used for? Storytelling is always important and is particularly topical this week when there is a great conference on the subject. Examples of practical uses of storytelling abound in the fields of training and elsewhere. One of the most practical uses is in aviation, a field in which storytelling is rife.…

  • The value of a story

    How often have you heard … “Have you heard that … ?” “Don’t forget the old saying: …” “Did you hear the one about … ?” The need to pass on “the one about …” is based on the urge to share a good story. This happens with jokes, mythical tales and real life stories.…

  • Sell the opportunity

    Treat every problem as an opportunity, we are told. At first sight it is an attractive idea, but further investigation reveals that it is a little too glib. Problems and opportunities are similar but different things; in a sense they are the opposite of one another. Edward de Bono, I think it was, who captured…

  • Helping other people to get what you want

    “We are not a cruise ship. We are an explorer ship!” This is one of the key messages in the passenger briefing on the ships of the Hurtigruten service which runs daily northbound and southbound along the coast of Norway. For nearly 500 passengers recently boarded at Bergen, almost all of them on a cruise…

  • Meeting Ann Holman

    Innovation was a theme on Friday morning, when I had the pleasure of meeting Ann Holman in person. What an energetic and forward thinker she is! We’d already conversed briefly by electronic means, and so we arranged to meet IRL (In Real Life), as others have termed it. Ann had already tweeted, although at the…

  • Is “IT” “in denial”?!

    This is probably true, but who really cares?

  • Let’s stop messing with the clocks!

    The whole concept of adjusting the clocks with the seasons, “Daylight Saving” as the Americans call it, seems increasingly ludicrous the more that one thinks about it. In the UK, it is called British Summer Time and is abbreviated to BST; I call it British Silly Time. The expensive consequences for computer systems, airlines, railways and…

  • 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…

  • Less is more!

    There seems to be an upsurge of interest in the philosophy of “less is more”. A couple of recent articles about product design, in general and in a specific case, address relevant aspects of this phenomenon. What do we know? On one level, we tend to question: how can “less” be “more”? We know it…

  • Social communication is with us

    The technology of communication devices, systems, services  has changed over the years. There have been telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and a variety of others. The characteristics of each technology have dictated the behavioural model of the systems and the services available to users. With the advent of the internet, systems have tended to emulate traditional…