Cautionary Tales – why organisations squander good ideas… I’ve been so pleased at all the kind comments from around the world about the new season of Cautionary Tales. If you haven’t sampled it, please do so. I love working on the scripts and the narration, […]

I’m delighted to announce that the paperback edition of “How To Make The World Add Up” is imminent – it will be published on 6th May in the UK as well as Australia, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa , and indeed anywhere else […]

Pepsi twice ended up in court after promotions went disastrously wrong. Other big companies have fallen into the same trap – promising customers rewards so generous that to fulfil the promise might mean corporate bankruptcy. Businesses and customers alike are sometimes blinded by the big […]

Has the economic clock started to run backwards? The defining fact of economic history is that, over time, humans have been able to produce vastly more of whatever goods and services they value. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith had no doubts that the […]

A few weeks ago Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter and I sat down to talk about “what do the numbers mean?”, courtesy of the Cambridge Festival. The conversation is now online – enjoy! I am popping with delight at the news that I have been shortlisted […]

How assuming others understand exactly what we are thinking gets people killed. Why were soldiers on horseback told to ride straight into a valley full of enemy cannon? The disastrous “Charge of the Light Brigade” is usually blamed on blundering generals. But the confusing orders […]

In 1928, Karl Jansky, a young radio engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, began researching static interference that might obscure voice transmissions. Five years later, after building a large rotating antenna and investigating every possibility he could think of, he published his remarkable conclusion: some of […]

The New Yorker reviews “The Data Detective” – a wonderful essay from Hannah Fry titled What Data Can’t Do. Go for the anecdote about Tony Blair, stay for the phrase “insidious Kahnemanian swap”. Book of the week: Math without Numbers by Milo Beckman. I picked […]

The height of stupidity is being too stupid to know you are stupid… and it’s more common than you think. The hijackers of flight 961 wanted its pilot to fly them to Australia – and wouldn’t listen to his pleas that there simply wasn’t enough […]

It isn’t often I receive an email that makes me smoulder with rage. This one did, which was strange since it was perfectly polite. My correspondent wanted to know why he wasn’t allowed to meet his friends indoors for coffee. They were in their early […]