Dennis Lennard
CEO & Managing Partner, Creative Navy. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Dennis Lenard is the CEO and Managing Partner of Creative Navy, a digital design agency specializing in complex interfaces and medical software. He also lectures on ergonomic UX/UI design at King's College London.
1shows
1appearances
18statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything Dennis Lennard said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Dennis Lennard: Corporate politeness creates groupthink and suppresses internal criticism
“It's also very common to see corporations or large teams who fall into the group thing trap because they're in large organizations. There is a lot of culture around not upsetting people and being nice to each other, which is of course great in terms of getting…”
Dennis Lennard: Managing hurt feelings from sound critique is the recipient's problem
“Whenever you feel hurt by someone's feedback, or what someone says about something you've done, it's your own problem. Even if it feels like they're being a jerk to you, it's your own problem, as long as what they say is sound conceptually.”
Dennis Lennard: Hiring specific personality types cannot eliminate groupthink
“You cannot avoid it just by hiring a particular type of people. Of course, there are people for whom sort of the wellbeing of the group and the positive feeling while you're together is more important than for others, but nobody is immune.”
Dennis Lennard: Teams should prefer overly harsh criticism over conflict avoidance
“It helps a lot to develop a culture that encourages being critical. So that means that you might prefer having people who are too critical or maybe criticism being phrased too harsh in terms of how you communicate it rather than a culture where you cannot tole…”
Dennis Lennard: Feature-bloated products mask the insecurities of their builders
“If something relies on a lot of complexity, perhaps the product is a conglomerate of a ton of features, and for some reason we say that they all have to work together at the same time, otherwise users will not like it. These types of things are actually a way …”
Dennis Lennard: All-in-one software bundles are rarely innovative
“If your product does one thing so well that everybody wants it, it's probably something innovative. If your product does 25 things that other products do, but it has just combined them into one, it's probably not that innovative. It's just a mix of everything …”
Dennis Lennard: Small silos reduce social friction during product evaluation
“I think it definitely helps creating little silos where the product or any kind of challenge can be looked at from different perspectives is useful because obviously you, when there are fewer people around, there's less to worry about in terms of this is going…”
Dennis Lennard: Groups of experts risk losing critical thinking to consensus
“Just like with when you put three experts together, they can perhaps quickly persuade each other to do something in the way that it's always been done, because they all know that this is how This thing is done. So that again means that critical thinking just g…”
Dennis Lennard: Products cannot scale beyond the MVP phase on improvisation alone
“That is in fact the challenge specifically creating a robust foundation because you cannot scale out of an improvisation. You know, you can put together some features and some interfaces and some coding That's sort of a partial solution, but if it's not robust…”
Dennis Lennard: The desire to preserve harmony causes groupthink
“The number one factor that leads to groupthink is the desire not to upset people or to upset the balance or, you know, the positive feelings in the group and so on.”
Dennis Lennard: Stacking product workarounds signals a fundamental conceptual failure
“Whenever you feel that you have to find a workaround in order to make another workaround work, and that generates another workaround and so on. In user experiences and you might experience that as we keep adding icons in a place where we shouldn't add icons. W…”
Dennis Lennard: Scaling an unoptimized business model multiplies operational waste
“This is where, when it comes to scaling, it's very interesting to look at franchises because the whole franchising model is based on the idea of figuring out only the valuable features of the business, stripping away all the rest, and then scaling that a lot. …”
Dennis Lennard: Every feature added to a product introduces dangerous complexity
“Anything that you allow into the product is going to add a lot more complexity than you think. So it's very, very dangerous. You should treat it like it's radioactive. You need something in the product, but everything you put in is dangerous.”
Dennis Lennard: True software innovation requires perfecting a single architectural principle
“On the other hand, if you take one principle or one aspect of this entire ecosystem, perhaps it could be the aspect of integrating all of these. In some way. And if you really figure out how they can be integrated or that one principle, how it could be made ex…”
Dennis Lennard: Non-experts often spot fundamental flaws that domain experts obscure
“That's not necessarily a given because sometimes not being an expert in something also means you have a simplistic look at things, but that might actually enable you to see those fundamental contradictions in an idea, which are easily explained the way by addi…”
Dennis Lennard: Avoiding groupthink requires normalizing restarting product development from scratch
“What is very important at that point to avoid group thinking is having a culture where it's okay to realize that you've made a huge mistake, actually, not just a small one. And that you have to go back to do it from scratch.”
Dennis Lennard: Great products must conform to objective reality, not feelings
“If you want to do great things unfortunately you have to conform to reality and not to your own emotion or to whatever you agree with everyone else. Life and reality is very harsh. We don't have to be harsh to each other. But as long as we're trying something …”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dennis's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 WE LIVE TO BUILDLEDGER | CEO & Managing Partner, Creative Navy | 1 | 18 | — | full record on We Live to Build → |