What I’m reading this holiday
2 min readDec 20, 2019
As 2019 draws to an end I’m going to be giving myself a whole two weeks off completely (today is my last day).
As well as lots of rest and social time I’m looking forward to, I really want to use the time off work to properly read several of the articles and books that have caught my eye throughout November & December.
It feels like a really important opportunity to reflect and learn, given what a big year it has been for me and what the recent election results say about our society and country’s future.
Some of these will be shorter reads that I just wasn’t in the headspace for fully taking in when I first came across them, and some are longer reads that I started and then realised that I didn’t have the time for that week.
Books
- Switch — how to change things when change is hard. To be fair, I am already halfway through reading this, but finding it very thought provoking and immediately practically useful.
- The Lean Startup. Pretty much a bible at this point, but I’d never thought about reading the thing until Ellie lent me a copy.
- The Power of Habit. Helping people to build lasting habits seems fundamental if we are to be successful in embedding better behaviours in organisations, so I am excited to learn much more about this area.
Articles
- Research: For Better Brainstorming, Tell an Embarrassing Story
- The Silent Meeting Manifesto v1: Making meeting suck a little less
- 10 facilitation lessons to use in your next workshop
- The Science Behind Adopting New Habits (And Making Them Stick)
- Paula Surridge — Making sense of vote intention polling in (very) uncertain times
- How to organise an empowering open meeting. Radical think tank training document July 2016
- MeasuringU: Sample Size in Usability Studies: How Well Does the Math Match Reality?
- Using the cognitive interview to improve your survey questions
- Seeing the Elephant: Defragmenting User Research
- Why is Psychological Safety at Odds With the Way We Work? — Mind the Product
- 4 tips for product teams who want to improve their user research
- How to look at evidence and not translate it into your own agenda
- Five dysfunctions of ‘democratised’ research. Part 1 — Speed trumps validity
- If you push beyond digital, what happens next?
- A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
- The Social Change Grid
- Materials and content to support better Digital Grantmaking
