There is a leader within each of us who has been waiting. She leads with compassion, emotional intelligence, creativity, and intuition. She builds through collaboration, holds space for complexity, and moves with the flexibility that generates genuinely new outcomes — not just faster versions of the old ones. In most organisations, these qualities have been...
It’s been a week! Days of working to get different software systems to talk to each other and ‘conversing’ with chatbots, trying to penetrate the rigidity of their scripts, to access help. A life on repeat. Eventually a breakthrough has been made. Everything looks like it is synced (fingers crossed). As frustrating as the process...
Some years ago, a good (and older than me) friend was fond of saying ‘the older I get, the less I know.’ Usually, it followed some unexpected and illogical incident or inquiry. At the time I found the statement a little puzzling. How could we know less, surely with age we know more? And yet...
We might interpret gaps as negatives, a lack of, a hole to be filled, a deficit. Gaps in a usually busy diary might cause anxiety. Am I needed? Working hard enough? Is there a problem? We can obsess when others have knowledge or skills we feel we don’t. A gap. I am learning to think...
Routines, habits, life-acquired filters. They’re helpful in managing the day to day. On the other hand, rigidly adhered to, never examined for value, they become blinkers, or worse, blindfolds, blocking the light of higher possibility. The world shifts, its issues ever more pressing, our perspective stays stuck. We operate solo, and as organisations, on autopilot....
When the original 13 colonies merged to form a single US nation the founding fathers adopted the motto E Pluribus Unum – out of the many, one. Notwithstanding the challenges the US and all of us around the world face from division and polarisation isn’t this motto – which speaks so powerfully and inspiringly to...
Change or transformation? Big, fat words, used interchangeably, describing radically different fields of play and outcomes. Change is like moving the deckchairs. Transformation puts us into an entirely different universe. A new state. Reimagined, reinvented. Think tadpole to frog, caterpillar to butterfly. In organisations, and life, change ensures we survive the headwinds and turbulence. It’s...
Mike and the Mechanics famously sang that ‘every generation blames the one before’ and based on a qualitative survey of two – so neither statistically significant or scientific – I am informed that ‘blaming the Boomers’ is a thing among young people. There’s a wake-up call in this. With the many challenges our world faces...
On one of our recent leadership programmes we asked people to envision the future shape and scope of a particular aspect of their business. ‘How will such and such look and feel in 25 years’ time?’ we asked. For some the pragmatism of now and what we know took over. Others let their imaginations run....
Are you in a rut? Is the way you lead pretty much the same as it was five years ago, give or take a few minor adjustments? Spotting when we’re stuck can, at times, be tricky. Relentless focus on delivering the goods means modern leaders have little time to look up, out, and ahead. Or...