About
Barrie
This page exists because somebody, eventually, wants to know who wrote all that. I write, I build small things that probably shouldn't exist, and I ask questions long after it has stopped being polite.
Four headings below. They're the honest version.
I Play
I have never been able to leave an idea alone. If something looks like it might work, I would rather build a small ugly version of it than write a strategy about it. Most of what I have made started as a curious thought that refused to leave.
TapLearnGo
Learning in very small pieces, delivered where people already are. Built because long courses are where good intentions go to die.
Testy Tuesday
A weekly quiz for hospitality teams. Named on a Tuesday, obviously, and nobody has come up with a better name since.
I Write
Some of the writing is mine and lands on this blog. Some of it is done for other people, through Calidascope, where the job is to take something a client half-knows and turn it into words their audience can actually hold on to. And then there are the books, which are what happens when the writing gets out of hand.
The Little Book of Play
With Ali Polley-Green. A book designed for adults, and kids. You're never too old to play.
Juno and the Star Lift-Off Launcher
A children's book with a title that took longer to say than to write. No apologies.
I Speak
Occasionally on a stage, more often into a microphone in a room on my own. I am not chasing bookings, so consider this a description rather than an offer.
The Meeting is Dead, Long Live the Meeting
A podcast about the thing everyone complains about and nobody cancels. Conversations with people who have quietly worked out how to make meetings worth the hour.
Flying Unstable
A talk about how modern fighter jets are deliberately built to be unstable, because stability is slow. Make of that what you will about your organisation.
I Explore
This is the part that explains why the blog wanders. One month it is Carl Benz and the failure of imagination, the next it is whether a machine can brew a better beer than a man who has been doing it for twenty years, and then it is a list of things I read that had nothing to do with either.
I have made peace with it. The interesting things are almost never filed under the heading you expected, and a site organised around one neat topic would be a lie about how I actually think.
Go and read something