Thoughts

  In my last post, we looked at the barriers to curiosity thriving at work.  Now, let’s have a look at what a ‘curious culture’ looks, sounds and feels like. When I look around and find organisations that have what I reckon are curious cultures, the one thing I notice is the energy in the […]

    How do you cultivate more curiosity at work? I’ve discussed the importance of curiosity in a previous post. Now I’d like to dig into it a little more with you. As curiosity trends toward becoming a highly valued commodity, I’ve been curious about what it takes to be more than a word on a […]

  Whatever you’re working on now, it’s bigger than that. Whatever your plans are for the next twelve months, it’s bigger than them. Whatever your job title, your profession, your organisation, your industry. It’s bigger than all of them. The poet David Whyte says what you can plan is too small for you to live. […]

  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 […]

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 […]

Recently I was working with a group of about 20 people at a residential workshop. It was morning tea time and we were all gathered in a room relishing our caffeine top-ups. As facilitator, it was my job to keep people on time. I considered how I’d let them all know when it was time […]

“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 […]

When I was about 14 years old, I joined my school’s Army Cadet corps. It was attractive because I’d heard they did cool things out in the bush. I was having a bit of a hard time at boarding school, and I thought it would a great respite. It wasn’t what I expected. The rule-bound […]

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 […]

How valuable are you to your organisation? Or to your clients? You must add some value, right? Otherwise why would they hire you? In a disruptive, fast-moving world, what’s valued today is less likely to be the same as what’s valued tomorrow. Consider the plethora of evidence out there to show us that the jobs […]