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With the relentless advance of technology, and the equally relentless fact that none of us has yet discovered how to reverse ageing, 2026 has presented me with some new opportunities — and some new dilemmas.

My wife and I are now in our sixties and, fortunately, in reasonably good health. She is older than I am and has quite reasonably decided that she dislikes airports and dislikes long-haul flights even more.

This created a problem.

For the first time in nearly thirty years, I would have to travel to Japan without her.

Apart from the interruption caused by COVID-19, we have made an annual trip to Japan since we married in 1997. Normally we stay for two or three weeks and make a proper holiday of it. On two previous occasions work had restricted me to seven days away from London, resulting in a rather less ambitious five-night stay.

In 2026 I found myself booking another five-night visit.

This time, however, there was a difference. My adult son had travelled to Japan ahead of me as part of a world tour, and I had the opportunity to join him at a prestigious international event. Because of my wife’s health constraints, I wanted to spend the minimum possible time away from London while still attending the event with him.

The result was a rather brutal itinerary: approximately 48 hours on the ground in Japan, still suffering from jet lag, followed by another 48 hours before the long-haul flight home.

This was not tourism. It was like a military operation involving a passport.

I booked a particularly well-appointed hotel close to the venue, not far from the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo. I arrived appropriately dressed and, having explored the neighbourhood around the hotel the previous evening, reasonably well orientated.

I was ready. I was also expecting rather more than I received.

Expectations

My Japanese is not especially good, but I have mastered the basics and have made considerable progress through the different levels of formality. I pride myself on being something of a polyglot: I can communicate, with varying degrees of proficiency, in five foreign languages.

Japanese provides an interesting additional dimension. In the appropriate circumstances I can use formal Japanese; in more formal situations I can use language designed to exalt my counterpart while humbling myself. And, when necessary, I can abandon diplomatic niceties and become considerably more direct.

The invitation to this particular international event was welcome for two reasons.

First, my son had spent much of 2026 travelling around the world and I wanted to see him.

Second, I wanted to see what this new organisation in Tokyo was actually like.

The event involved 185 delegates from 46 nations. That creates a certain expectation. So did the organisation’s pedigree.

My own professional experience has included PricewaterhouseCoopers, the British Medical Association, CERN and universities including Cambridge, London, Leuven, Harvard and Stanford. I have also had the privilege of being invited to diplomatic institutions and of meeting members of the Royal Family and eminent ambassadors.

I mention this not because I expect a red carpet to be rolled out whenever I enter a building, but because I am not entirely unfamiliar with professional hospitality at an international level.

Outside my professional life, I am deeply involved in the London technology community. Working with teams of volunteers, many of them software developers, I organise community events for audiences of between 100 and 300 people. I have chaired committees responsible for such events several times.

I am therefore reasonably familiar with the practical requirements of conferences: operations, security, catering, plenary sessions, multiple tracks and breakout rooms.

I also spent three years as chair of International Business Professionals, an organisation that staged smaller events in Brussels, Amsterdam and London between 1999 and 2009.

And I have spent time as president of a Toastmasters club in London.

These experiences have taught me one important lesson. Managing volunteers is often harder than managing employees. In business, we have at least the pretence that everyone is working towards the same strategic plan and owes some allegiance to the hierarchy. In a community organisation, everyone tends to have an agenda of his or her own, accompanied by a greater or lesser commitment to the objectives of the group. It is sometimes remarkable that community events work at all. When they work well, they can be extraordinarily good.

Which brings us back to Tokyo.

The first cup of tea

For reasons that I am now beginning to question, I expected that an international event of this calibre might provide something quite elementary on arrival: hot tea or hot coffee.

It did not.

The Japanese are rightly famous for their courtesy, and a short conversation established that instead of kocha sutoreito … black tea … I would be happy to have ocha, Japanese green tea.

A member of the catering team disappeared into the kitchen. A little later he returned with a glass of iced green tea. At this point I realised that I had failed to specify hotto kocha.

The Japanese quite reasonably drink iced coffee and iced tea during the summer. I had simply failed to make myself sufficiently clear.

So I exchanged the appropriate expressions of gratitude and accepted my fate.

It was my fault. I had asked for tea. I had not asked for hot tea. This would prove to be a recurring theme.

Artificial intelligence and natural stupidity

The keynote speaker had prepared an intelligent and engaging presentation on modern technological developments, particularly artificial intelligence. One of the central messages was that we must have the courage to challenge AI when it is wrong. Quite right.

We were told that unless we challenge erroneous output, we risk damaging our own reputations and those of our employers. Again, quite right. The audience, which included international guests who had travelled specifically to attend the event, was encouraged to question, challenge and speak up. It was an excellent message. I took it seriously. I suspect the organisers subsequently regretted this.

The morning continued with several thoughtful presentations before the inevitable adjournment for lunch. I was now confident that I would obtain a cup of hot black tea. I was wrong.

The woman with the microphone

Instead, I encountered a member of staff who appeared to have overdosed on sugar before being handed a microphone. She was downstairs, organising delegates for a group photograph. I was on the third floor.

For reasons that remain mysterious to me, the public-address system was delivering a continuous commentary from an extremely enthusiastic woman at a volume suitable for evacuating a railway station.

The content was worse than the volume.

A room full of international adults was being addressed as though it contained 10-year-old children who had just been released from a school assembly.

The combination of inappropriate language and disproportionate volume became intolerable.

Eventually I left the reception room and stood in the corridor, where at least my ears were given the opportunity to recover.

I now had no hot tea and diminished hearing. The morning was going well.

The convenience-store solution

I approached a member of the operations team. It was quickly established that the simple guaranteed way for me to obtain a cup of hot tea was to visit the convenience store I had noticed the previous evening. So I did. I returned to the venue carrying a hot tea in a paper takeaway cup. I must have looked like the most eccentric English gentleman in Tokyo.

The paper cup also made me easy to identify as the man who had been complaining about the hospitality. Had it not been for the woman shouting into the public-address system at a room full of adults, I might have restrained myself and said nothing about anything.

But there are limits. A physical assault on my ear drums was the last straw.

The elusive toilet

Then things became even more impressive.

The sign directing delegates to the toilets pointed towards a locked door marked Emergency Exit.

I pointed this out to a member of staff.

He immediately directed me towards the actual toilets and, to his credit, moved the offending sign to the correct position.

One problem solved. One might almost call this kaizen. There was still lunch.

Lunch presented another challenge.

Paella.

With chopsticks.

I have some experience of cultural incompatibility involving food. On one occasion in London I was served sushi with a fork. Despite the cultural contradiction, I managed to complete the operation. Eating paella with chopsticks, however, proved to be beyond even my considerable powers of improvisation. I searched for a fork or spoon.

The only implement I could find was a teaspoon of almost comic proportions.

I can report that it is technically possible to eat paella with a tiny teaspoon. It is not, however, an experience I recommend.

But there was a more fundamental problem. It was not always possible to obtain a glass of water.

The elusive glass of water

At the bar, I politely asked in formal Japanese for a glass of water. The member of staff reached for a two-litre bottle and a glass.

At that precise moment, another Englishman standing at the bar engaged me in conversation. I never discovered what happened to my water. Perhaps it arrived. Perhaps somebody else drank it.

Perhaps it remains in Tokyo to this day, a monument to unfinished hospitality. The bar contained champagne and fruit juice, all readily available.

Water, however, was apparently a specialist service. This astonished me. In Britain, the provision of drinking water at events of this type is a legal requirement. More importantly, an international event should recognise that not every delegate drinks alcohol or wants to consume sugary fruit juice. I am hardly alone in this. There is a substantial international community of people who drink alcohol rarely or not at all.

Some of us simply want water. And tea. Preferably hot.

Courage to speak up

Eventually I broke away from my conversation with the quaint Englishman, who happened to be discussing precisely the same themes: the courage to criticise things that are wrong and the relentless advance of information technology.

I am a retired schoolteacher of computer science. I had been told that we should challenge technology when it was wrong. So I decided to challenge the bar. This time I used rather more direct Japanese.

In English, the sentiment might have been expressed as:

“Am I getting a glass of water or not?”

Miraculously, a glass of water appeared almost immediately.

Technology had not been required. Nor, apparently, had artificial intelligence.

The Chairman arrives

Not long afterwards, the chairman of the organisation found me.

By this stage I was easy to identify.

I was the demented Englishman carrying a paper cup.

He engaged me in polite conversation.

I have now discovered a useful shortcut to meeting the chairman of a prestigious international organisation: criticise the hospitality.

It saves a great deal of networking!

More seriously, we had an entirely civil conversation in English about the shortcomings of the event. The discussion centred largely on the absence of hot tea and the assault upon my ears.

Both of us were reasonably familiar with international standards and with Japanese society, so I raised the subject of Peter Drucker’s affection for Japan and his interest in kaizen … continuous improvement.

The point was not that everything had been badly done. Far from it. The speakers were generally strong. The keynote presentation was thoughtful. The staff were, for the most part, courteous and willing to help when problems were identified.

The problem was that too many small failures had accumulated.

A missing cup of hot tea is trivial.

A badly positioned toilet sign is trivial.

A teaspoon for paella is amusing.

The absence of readily available drinking water is more serious.

A public-address system operated at an absurd volume is not merely irritating; it is a failure of basic consideration for the people in the room.

And when these things occur at an event representing an international organisation, involving 185 delegates from 46 countries, the cumulative effect matters.

Reputation is built from details.

So is its opposite.

What happens next?

I expect to return in a year’s time.

That will provide an interesting test. Will the organisation have listened? Will it have acted? Will the lessons have been converted into improvements? That is what kaizen demands.

Today’s blogpost, like yesterday’s conversation, pulls few punches. But the criticism is well intentioned. Indeed, the keynote speaker gave me the justification for making it. He told us to have the courage to speak up when something is wrong. I did.

I also followed a principle I learnt through Toastmasters: commend, recommend, commend.

So let me finish in that spirit. I commend the chairman for taking the criticism seriously and for engaging with a rather eccentric delegate carrying a paper cup.

I commend the quality of several of the speakers and the thought that had gone into the programme.

I recommend that the speakers obtain recordings of their presentations, watch them critically and consider what they could improve.

I recommend that the operations team conduct the same exercise with the event itself.

And I recommend one particularly simple experiment:

Try attending the event as a delegate.

Arrive jet-lagged.

Ask for tea.

Ask for water.

Find the toilets.

Eat the lunch.

Sit in the reception room while somebody shouts through a public-address system.

Then ask yourself whether this is the experience you would want to provide to 185 international guests.

That, after all, is kaizen.

And next year, when I return to this part of Tokyo, I look forward to something considerably less ambitious than technological transformation. I would simply like a hot cup of tea.

No difficulty, no linguistic ambiguity, no ear defenders.

Just tea. Hot tea. Surely that cannot be beyond the wit of an international organisation?

It was revelationary in its time. By modern standards “A Discourse on the Method” is a peculiar little book. At times, sharp, intriguing, instructional and worthy. Though elsewhere it is woolly, cryptic, impenetrable and introverted.

Scholars of Descartes will no doubt have built up more understanding of this societal misfit, by first reading around the subject. With no more than Ian Maclean’s valuable preface and the notes in the 2008 edition from Oxford University Press, this exceedingly short book is still an exacting read.

Maybe I chose the wrong approach, but with my basic general knowledge of Descartes I dived straight in to the academic challenge of reading the English version of Descartes’ 1637 French original. Maclean’s invaluable preface over the first 75 pages is longer than the 63 pages written by Descartes himself! That’s followed by a further 21 pages of notes, leading to a total of 159 pages of deep, intense musings about the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Two things stood out in particular:

Descartes’ Maxims
The Simplicity Model

It is alleged that Einstein said “make everything as simple as possible, and no simpler than that”. However, you won’t find that paraphrased quote in any of Einstein’s material. It’s a 1950 quote from Roger Sessions in The New York Times. Sessions was a composer who discussed why he writes such difficult violin pieces! Whatever Einstein is alleged to have said seems to be rooted in what Descartes said.

It’s a trait of modern life that the work of earlier luminaries is recycled. Sessions implicates Einstein when it’s actually Descartes’ original idea! Henry Gantt rebranded Karol Adamiecki’s Harmonogram as the Gantt Chart without attribution! Peter Drucker borrowed much of his material from Henri Fayol without attribution! Stephen Covey nicked Dwight Eisenhower’s time management matrix without attribution!

Descartes’ Maxims

Descartes’ Maxims are his, not mine, and this is my summary of the salient detail.

1. Stay within the law. For better or for worse, the jurisdiction where you live has laws, probably written that way for good reason. “Always obey the law” is probably a better maxim than “always break the law”.

2. Travel along straight lines. Life is a melting pot of ideas, concepts, good intentions, bad habits, and eleventy billion people trying to influence what you do. Learn to ignore the distractions. See the forest analogy below.

3. Accentuate the positive. And eliminate the negative. For the best of reasons, parents, teachers and our peers have burdened our early lives with their views. Jettison the unnecessary baggage! But retain and improve the valuable bits!

Descartes suggests that at some poignant moment in your life you look back (consciously or sub consciously) at all things you’ve done, and decide that there has to be a better way! For me that was in my mid twenties. At that point the analogy says that you are in the middle of a dense forest, unsure of which direction to travel. You could explore, and find yourself going in circles (consciously or sub consciously), and never leave the forest. Or you could choose to follow a straight line.

Which straight line? Does it matter? Whichever straight line you choose, it will lead you out of the forest. By all means exercise some judgement about the direction of travel. And then stick to it as best you can. In a dense forest your straight line may not be perfectly straight, but a conscientious mind will help you focus on keeping it as straight as possible. Do not question your resolve and change direction, because you may end up going around in circles again.

At some point you will exit the forest. Your judgement back in the forest ensured that you would leave it behind, and you may even have arrived at something approaching the ideal new place. No matter whether you encounter mountains, lakes, plains or suburbia, your path will become clearer. You can then make a fresh judgement call and if necessary select a new straight line to follow.

This is a metaphor for life, and it involves dismissing all the unhelpful thoughts and baggage that you may have picked along the way. Ultimately, according to Descartes the objective is “acquire all the virtues and other goods we are capable of acquiring – and when certain that we have what we sought, we cannot fail to be happy”.

This is the fundamental part of what he calls his “method”. Obey the law, travel in straight lines, jettison the crap, and assemble worthy knowledge and possessions.

I had always though that “the method” was something bigger and more abstract, like “evolution”. It’s basically Descartes writing an early self help book which should have been titled “My Method”.

The Simplicity Model

Modern innovation is based on Descartes’ two rules.

Rule One: apply methodical doubt. If somebody says something is definite, think of it as probable. If he says it’s probable, think of it as possible, and if he says it’s possible, forget it.

Rule Two: be reductionist, that is, reduce your view of everything down to its simplest component elements. That way you can see how it works and if it breaks, how to fix it.

Breaking things down into smaller and smaller elements is the method Descartes used to overcome procrastination. The challenge is to break down a trivial task into a series of amazingly trivial tasks so that the brain can be tricked into starting one of them. It’s a strategy that Peter Checkland recommends in his classic book “Systems Thinking, Systems Practice” and he acknowledges that it came from Descartes.

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Peter Bregman discusses the “break it down” process and then urges us to avoid procrastination by focussing on the first step in a series of simple steps. And that normally means moving away from doing something comfortable (watching light entertainment) to doing something uncomfortable (reading a serious text). He suggests we need to be good at “moving from comfort to discomfort”.

That first step for me is often “stand up”, followed by walk away from the screen, followed by pick up the book and sit in my comfy chair.

Is there something that you need to do, but you’ve been putting it off? What is your first step to starting that challenge?

Early on Sunday morning 29 Dec 2024 I went out for a walk in central London. Instead of going down along the river like I often do, this time I walked to Spitalfields Market. It was early, some traders were busy setting up, the public were few and far between, and there was nothing really open yet.

Then, for the first time, I noticed an outlet called “Jenki”. It’s a Matcha bar. It’s a poor imitation of Japan. The word “genki” has a hard “g” as in “get” so why they called the shop “Jenki” I have no idea. As with much Japanese language, the word “genki” is not easy to translate. But Japanese speakers like me know that the word is a blend of “vitality” or “spirited” or “energised”.

More importantly, Japanophiles like me (with dozens of visits to Japan) also know that Matcha is not really green tea. Its colour and its flavour are forced unnaturally.

The humble tea bush is largely the same across Asia. If you dry out the leaves, you have the basis for green tea. If you roast the leaves, you can create black tea. That’s basically all there is to it! Green tea from green leaves, and black tea from black leaves.

Should your tea plantation want to produce more tea more quickly, then there are ways to accelerate nature, and you can make a powder version of green tea. You can also do the same sort of thing with your roasted tea leaves and you can have instant black tea. Coffee beans too! Have you ever seen instant coffee powder? Have you ever seen an “instant coffee powder” shop? One that charges you £4.95 for one cup of Tesco value brand coffee?

So the aficionados of Matcha are getting excited about instant green tea in a way that nobody would ever get excited about instant black tea or instant coffee powder!

Matcha tea leaves are grown in the normal way, but about three weeks before harvesting, they are covered in black plastic! That forces the plant to produce more chlorophyll (the green pigment) as it searches vainly for usable sunlight. And that gives Matcha its extra strong flavour, and its unnatural deep green colour. You can also produce more tea from fewer square metres!

I don’t like Matcha. I have a feeling that the UK public will eventually tire of it too, because it’s the equivalent of instant black tea or instant coffee powder. And I believe that places like the Jenki Matcha Bar will wither and die in the foreseeable future.

I drink Sencha. And not just any old Sencha, I prefer the better quality brands. Think of it as equivalent to Assam or Darjeeling. I don’t want the Sainsbury version of Assam or Tesco’s own Darjeeling, I want the nice ones from places like Whittard of Chelsea. So I order my Sencha from Hashimoto, a small specialist shop in my adopted home town in Japan.

At High Street outlets in the UK I will settle for an Assam tea from Twinings, or sometimes a simple PG Tips. I have never found a decent green tea on any High Street anywhere in the UK. Whereas in Japan I can get a nice Sencha almost anywhere, and a knowing smile from the staff who understand why I do not drink Matcha! Or Mugicha, or Houjicha!

The term user friendly originated in the days when computers became more widely available. Firstly in the 1960s across bigger businesses, then in the 1970s with the advent of the early personal computers. By the 1980s the concept of user friendly had matured and the desktop computer revolution was in full swing.

It was originally termed human computer interaction (HCI). That had a focus on user interface (UI) design. And it referred to systems or interfaces that are easy for users to understand and interact with.

Nowadays, if you check a dictionary you will find that user friendly is usually defined as an adjective that describes something (such as a product, a system, or an interface) that’s easy to use or to understand.

So user friendly is a term that describes products, interfaces, or systems which are designed with the user’s ease of use and convenience in mind. It’s supposed to signify that the item in question is intuitive, easy to understand and to navigate, and it enables users to accomplish tasks with minimal effort and frustration. Whilst the term came about due to the advent of computers, it can be applied to everything. Think of travelling by roller skate, or pogo stick, or bicycle. Consider boiling an egg by using a campfire, or a gas stove, or a microwave oven.

Back in 1994, after 30 years in the field of technology and human computer interaction, Jeffrey Rubin wrote an excellent book entitled “The Handbook of Usability Testing”.

http://www.wiley.com/go/usabilitytesting

As early as page 4 he says:

“When a product or service is truly usable, the user can do what he or she wants to do, the way he or she expects to be able to do it, without hindrance, hesitation, or questions.”

If your product or service . . .

• has too many hoops to jump through to even get started; or
• places obstacles in the way of the user; or
• has inadequate documentation; or
• has a bland customer support system which offers nothing but platitudes;

. . . then your users will vote with their feet and walk away.

I recently sold my one year old BMW because I didn’t like the gimmicky dashboard, especially the heater controls. Correspondence with BMW in Farnborough (UK) proved so bad that I wrote to the head office in Munich. Nobody was listening me, and the responses (even from Germany) made it clear that they didn’t care what their customers thought.

I do not want to take my eyes off the road in order to adjust the ventilation. Particularly in bad, wet weather! If I suddenly want maximum heat and fan directed at the front windscreen, I want to reach for familiar tactile controls which I can operate without looking at them. The BMW arrangement had me looking down repeatedly in bursts of 2 to 5 seconds at a time. On a motorway at 70mph there was no way I was going to take my eyes off the road for the 10 to 20 seconds it needed to fiddle with the touch controls.

I replaced the one year old BMW with a one year old Volkswagen, the last in a line of cars which had tactile controls for ventilation. As a bonus the VW does not have a stupid computer that keeps telling me how I should drive.

For example, I rarely use the radio. It’s always off on short trips. The BMW has an onboard computer that automatically turns the radio on, loudly, and interrupts me with every single travel bulletin. In London in the morning rush hour there are travel bulletins every 10 minutes! Frustratingly, disabling the many unwanted “safety features” has to be done every time the engine is started. There is no global setting that I could invoke once and for all. As I explained to BMW, I want to drive the car, I do not want the car to drive me.

In comparison, my new Volkswagen is a delight. The first time I bought a secondhand VW was in 1982, and I switched later when my wife and I wanted an automatic. In 1998 automatic BMW 3 series were plentiful on the secondhand market, and were cheaper than any automatic Golf. Twenty six years later, and after a succession of 6 BMWs during that time, I am back to buying Volkswagens.

The next time you have issues with something ask the vendor to consider the “no hindrance, no hesitation, no questions” approach to being user friendly. Point them to Jeffrey Rubin’s book.

See what they do. Just talk the talk, or actually walk the walk?