In 2016 Leicester City Football Club won the English Premier League. The Foxes, as the team is known, started the season at 5000 to 1 odds. They narrowly avoided relegation just one year earlier, and had a player list that was just a fraction of the value of teams like Manchester United. This was one […]
100 Ways to Learn Through Life
Since ongoing learning is of such great importance to all of us I set out to write a list of all of the ways I could think of to learn through life. Turns out I came up with 100 …… Become a great listener Implement a new idea Subscribe to a journal or magazine Teach others Keep […]
How To Turn Up The Trust in Organisations and Teams
In the perfect organisation everyone would trust everybody else, all of the time. We all know that in the organisation of the real world things are not nearly this rosy. Some managers don’t trust their employees; some employees don’t trust their managers; members of one team sometimes don’t trust members of other teams; and teammates sometimes […]
How to Change Career Direction Without Running off the Road
Making decisions is not easy. There are so many choices available to us in today’s world that even small decisions like what to have for dinner can be difficult. It’s no surprise, then, that big decisions about our lives can be paralysing. At some point in our adult lives most of us will find […]
Don’t Take Life So Seriously – You’ll Never Get Out of it Alive
Being an adult can be serious business can’t it. For most of us there’s a job to hold down, bills to pay, a home to look after and family members to care for. In addition, we all face life challenges which can be related to health, worries about the people we care about, career […]
Continuous Learning for Continuous Improvement
Continuous improvement is essential for any modern organisation. Without it customers will go elsewhere, competitors will gain market share, good employees will be lost and the organisation will be at risk of failure. I’m convinced that there can be no continuous improvement in organisations without a continuous learning culture, and I believe there are 3 keys […]
Success and Happiness in Midlife
I’m in my late 40’s. Not young, not old …. middle aged. I’m not sure exactly how it happened but my young adulthood is in the rear view mirror and here I am, right smack bang in the middle of life. My midlife period has brought with it a few challenges, such as: My body isn’t […]
Starting Team Meetings with a Human Moment
Here’ a question for you if you’re a manager or a team leader. How do you spend the first 5 minutes of your your weekly/ fortnightly team meetings? We get straight down to serious business (e.g. we share project status updates) We talk about something work related but fairly light (e.g. we share good […]
Reframing For a Better, Brighter Picture
Recently my daughter Audrey was a bit concerned about something she needed to do at school. She told me she felt nervous. We talked about this for a while and I asked her what might be a different way to think about what she was going to be doing. After a while she looked […]
How Not to Treat Workers Like Robots
Automation has enabled modern organisations to make giant leaps forward. This has led to significant benefits such as improved reliability, greater accuracy, faster results and reduced costs. However, with automation comes a risk – that the people who work in organisations may begin to feel like robots rather than the real live human beings they are. To feel human […]