Are Things so Different Now? Yes! They Are!!

“They are stepping over the dead bodies,” I told him. My friend and I met at a business conference last week, and he was giving me his reflections on the new organisation he had been hired into recently as a senior strategist. He spoke about patterns his colleagues no longer seemed to notice. “You still have fresh […]

Learning from Failure

Here’s an experience this summer in which I didn’t come out of very well. Or did I? You be the judge. I was shopping for summer shoes. So I found a pair I liked in an M&S outlet. So I took these shoes to a stool to try them on. The right shoe did fit me […]

Secrets of an Outstanding Project

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to interview a couple of my clients from the British Antarctic Survey: Linda Capper, who is the Head of Communications, and Andy Jeffries, the Programme Manager for the new polar research vessel, the RRS Sir David Attenborough. I was honoured to be invited to the launch of the […]

Transparency and Vulnerability

In my last post, I began to explore radical transparency from a the example of a client organisation. To lead transparently generates trust. This kind of leadership shows up before people with integrity. Lead transparently and you generate trust. Click to Tweet However, a lot of leaders baulk at precisely this invitation to transparency. It […]

Deliverable Me

One of the joys of being a parent and, in my case, a grandparent is that you can indulge in watching some really good kids’ movies. And way up there in my top 10 is Despicable Me. We watched it again over the holidays. I love the movie, the storyline, and … I love the […]

Do you need a fall-back to move forward?

I was talking with a client last week who has a difficult relationship with a significant customer. What the customer is demanding my client to do would make him feel professionally compromised. He knows it is an inferior requirement. By a mile. We explored what would happen if he had a Plan B, a fall-back if he […]

Call to Failure

Failure is not an option. No, it’s inevitable. The issues is, first, will I accept that reality? Then can I act so that when I do fail, it is cheap and useful? When I do fail I do not do something worse: take failure as my identity. No, I am not a failure, but I do fail. […]

Outcome Thinking for Projects

Most people in project management have been told about the classic triangle: time, cost, quality; sometimes called the scope triangle. Its overall focus is on stewardship of spend, on containment, on control. You know, the one that looks like this:It encourages managers to consider how the impact of a suggested change might affect the scope […]

The War of Writing

In any act of creativity there is always a war going on. Many people attempting to create don’t get very far because they are unaware of this. Writers suffer from this war. In fact, all writers do. This particular warfare is waged between the writer’s ears. It’s in the mind. It’s about which mental narratives she […]