Calling Out the Gold in You

The Creative Heartbeat

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 […]

Margin is a Change Issue

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 […]

For the Love of Work

My friend Mike is an inventor, but he is not motivated by the conventional rewards of making it big time. What makes him tick?

Trapped in the Tactical

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 […]

“No, I don’t get it ….”

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 […]

Bright Spots

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 […]

The Dream Manager

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 […]

Keeping People in Frustrated Incompetence

As change leaders, we can have quite a high appetite for change. Yet, what is the effect on our customers of a perceived endless series of changes?

Range

I would recommend Range. It is one of the best books I have read so far this year. It explores a wide range of fields and topics from scientific research to athletic achievement to predicting engineering failure on spacecraft to education.

Did it fail because of the team?

… is it possible to go deeper and help individual team members engage with matters beyond their individual domains in positive ways? Specialists can show up to meetings as generalists, and they discover in a culture of honour and respect that they can engage with others with empathy and greater influence.

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