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When Smart People Realise They've Been Using Hammers on Everything
by Tony Quinlan on Oct 6, 2025 12:00:00 PM
The moment I remember most clearly happened on day two of a workshop in Silicon Valley. An engineering director - let's call him David - suddenly stopped mid-conversation and said, "Oh. Oh, we've been treating our culture change like a technical problem, haven't we?"
When Three Teams Became One (And Actually Meant It)
by Tony Quinlan on Aug 20, 2025 10:30:00 AM
Most team mergers try to eliminate differences and create alignment. We discovered the opposite approach worked better - embracing those differences and letting them become strategic advantages. Here's how that played out with a Unilever R&D team.
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case study
Using Stories To Increase Sales At Pfizer
by Tony Quinlan on Feb 21, 2025 11:49:27 AM
In late 2009, Pfizer's UK Primary Care regional office sought to enhance the performance of a mature medicine that, despite its own safety record, was affected by issues within its broader drug class. Recognising that sales representatives' confidence significantly influenced customer …
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case study
Using SenseMaker to understand girls' lives
by Tony Quinlan on Mar 19, 2018 6:02:08 PM
The Girl Hub SenseMaker® case study explores the use of SenseMaker®, an innovative, narrative-based research methodology, to gather girl-centered evidence in Rwanda and Ethiopia. This approach enables large-scale story collection and analysis to identify social patterns, behaviors, an …
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