Patrick Mayfield
The creative heart has a rhythm of expanding and contracting. When it expands, it creates possibilities, generating ideas, divergent in its thinking, exploring, and pursuing some even further. When it contracts, it is evaluating, assessing, honing, editing, eliminating, critiquing. Divergence and convergence. In any given moment, we do one or the other. The mistake that […]
Preface: As you read this, you may think this article is posted a week late. Please read on. Outside of the USA, most countries do not celebrate Thanksgiving as a holiday. And here in the UK, there is a particular suspicion over American holidays. (For example, we Brits have mixed feelings at best about the […]
A few years ago, I was called in to consult for a large IT transformation programme in healthcare. It concerned a large teaching hospital over a number of sites across a major city. The change would be so radical to current working practices that the systems provider had even built a simulated ward where the […]
My friend Mike is an inventor, but he is not motivated by the conventional rewards of making it big time. What makes him tick?
Image by Christopher Windus on Unsplash Recently I wrote some thoughts stimulated by my reading of Matthew Kelly’s The Dream Manager. I wrote about the importance of reconnecting with our dreams: Most of us are foolish with our future, saying things like, I have too… or I must…, or this won’t work, it never does. This is the language […]
In our village, there lived a car mechanic called Don, who was also a friend. His workshop was in the next town and over time he had built a business of loyal customers who trusted him and came to him with all kinds of problems — like the time our daughter filled her petrol car […]
Have you heard someone say that to you recently? Maybe not. Maybe they are thinking it. It requires someone to trust you, feel safe around you, confident enough to speak their mind, to be brave enough to say that they don’t get it. Maybe they are just faking it, and nod in agreement. Maybe you […]
Credit: Photo by Will Myers on Unsplash A few years ago I read Switch: How to Change Things when Change is Hard by the Heath brothers. It remains one of my favourite books on the whole subject of change. One particular section has stayed with me: the idea of the bright spots, the positive deviants, as academics call them, who can […]
I remember when I had a role in a large corporate, years ago. I described a particular director to a colleague as difficult. They were surprised. “Really? I know he is a bit gruff, but he really means well. Catch him in the right moment and he will listen to you.” And so it was. […]
What are your dreams? Have you written them down? If not, why not? Perhaps, because we are taught not to value dreaming. We are told that dreaming is wasting time. Dreams are fantasy and will never happen. Dreams only set us up for disappointment. We are all wired to dream. All children dream when they […]