Last week I had a day in London with 3 separate face to face meetings…and I have to say it was a treat! Nothing noteworthy there you might say but for me there was. It was powerful. Being ‘out there’ – away from the laptop screen – seeing and being with real people. Why? Because...
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...
Like me, you probably can’t fail to be aware of the shift in the prevailing narrative – sharper, at times brutal. Words like dictatorship, colonialism, imperialism, force, world on the brink, populism, and many others appear routinely in our media and, often, in our day-to-day talk, to describe the shifts we are living through. We...
The glue that holds the world together is relationship…between humanity and nature, between nations and peoples. The relationships in organisations, in community groups. In families. Between friends. These are such a fundamental part of human existence that perhaps we give them less attention, put in less effort than they undoubtedly deserve. Relationships have been much...
With the increased talk about war, I was reflecting on the role of business leaders and business in general to play a role in establishing peace. We are so used to delegating the responsibility for peace to world leaders and politicians. Or the United Nations. Or NGOs. But don’t we all have a part to...
Our conditioning dictates that the goal is the thing, not the process of getting there. I’m as caught in this groove as the next person. So, we might just pause (even though there’s stuff to do) and think about what we’re missing out on in this goal rush. And the impact of that. In being...
You are doing battle every day. Sometimes it can feel like a constructive use of energy. Sometimes it can feel hopeless. How often do we stop to really ask ourselves just what we are battling for? Heroes, knights and mercenaries all had/have their reasons for their battles. As leaders we are more than mindless cogs...
Okay. That’s not actually true. But it’s heartening that we have just seen the appointment of the first female Archbishop of Canterbury. Japan has its first female Prime Minister in Sanae Takaichi. And the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the incredibly courageous leader of the opposition in Venezuela, Maria Corina Machado, despite lobbying...
Too often optics drive the narrative. We’re seeing this daily from global leadership and in the micro in our own organisations and teams. Performance trumping substance, truth and trust. And trust is surely the thing here. Much of social media is eroding the ability to discern truth from fake content. The growing capability of AI...
In organisational life system is often taken to mean a process by which things get done – various steps, specialists, teams/departments involved in creating a product or delivering a service. When things go wrong we look for the break in the system. Conventional wisdom suggests looking for an individual responsible for the failure. Their competence...