Recently my family and I visited the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo. This place gives a great insight into the creative process behind the magical animated films of Studio Ghibli – films such as Spirited Away, Ponyo and My Neighbour Totoro (pictured). There is an especially strong focus on the work and vision of filmmaker and […]
Want to Enjoy Your Work More? Remember that All Organisations Are Imperfect.
During my very first economics lecture at the University of Queensland in the late 1980’s, my lecturer Dr Gunton made an observation that I have never forgotten. “All organisations are imperfect”, he pronounced with gusto from his academic pulpit in front of the crowded night time lecture theatre. I wrote this down, underlined it and filed […]
How Teams Can Embrace Positive Conflict
Conflict is a bad thing for a team, right? No, not right. Quite wrong actually. Show me a team where everyone always agrees and I’ll show you a team that’s falling a long way short of its potential. When teams avoid conflict these are some of the results: Growth and improvement will be limited, […]
Life Lessons From Leicester City FC
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
How to Safely Remove an Elephant From a Room
We all know the term “the elephant in the room”. This phrase usually refers to a serious issue that everyone knows about but doesn’t acknowledge or mention because it’s difficult to discuss or deal with. Examples of elephants hanging about in rooms are all around us. I bet some of these sound familiar: […]
