Thoughts

Rules. We live by them. We need them, actually. Otherwise, we’d be overloaded with decisions. Like having to think about which way to veer when we meet a car coming the other way on the road. Sticking to the left is a useful rule. Some rules are not so useful. Some rules limit us too much, […]

  Fresh ideas are powerful currency. New thinking can lead to renewed energy to tackle gnarly issues. Flashes of insight can spur new actions and new results. When you want to make change happen, your ideas are the starting point. And, for most of us, life is super-busy. It flies by like your view from a rushing […]

When people face something big and scary, they’ll often say “I need to muster up the courage to tackle that.” Kind of like courage is something that’s scattered around the place in small bits, and they just need to gather up all of those small bits and create a big courage ball. Then they’ll be […]

The late novelist David Foster Wallace tells a wonderful story about ‘incuriosity’ in his commencement speech This Is Water: There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish […]

As we near the end of 2016, I’ve summarised a few gems that you might find useful to dip in and out of: My Top Five Most Popular Blog Posts of 2016 A Map to Change: How to make a behaviour change by getting ‘under the hood’. Shine A Light: Show people their potential and […]

Opportunity abounds. We just need to cultivate our own agency to attract it. In my MBA class the other night, the students and I were looking at the forces and trends shaping the future of work and careers. The discussion naturally led to what the implications were for them, and how they might act or […]

  Most people find changing behaviours hard work. Our brain wiring is often set to drive a default pattern of behaviour, and unless we can get a good look at the wiring diagram, we’re going to be playing around in the dark. Here’s a tool that my clients find really useful to help them change […]

“May you live in interesting times. May you live in an interesting age. May you live in exciting times.” This phrase purportedly has it’s origins in China.  Over the past couple of hundred years, its popularity in the western world has tended to peak whenever the world goes into turmoil. I think it’s fair to […]

What if you could equip your next generation of leaders to deal with anything? If you could achieve that, what might happen? My latest white paper describes why this challenge is so important right now, and what you can do to future-proof your organisation, and our wider society, in the turbulent environment we find ourselves in. […]

You know and I know that training courses aren’t where we do most of our learning. But how deliberate are we about ‘doing our learning’ the rest of the time? Yesterday I wrapped up a leadership development programme that I’d been running over the past six months. Inevitably, participants want to know “how do we […]