The Answers You Need, Not Necessarily The Ones You Want To Hear — How often have you been in a situation where you have asked what someone thought, their opinions or how they were feeling? Fairly frequently, I guess. It is not an uncommon situation if you bump into more than one human a day. However how many times did you hear exactly…

Sometimes you just need to listen! “I hate this” I thought as I tried to convince a potential client to take us on. I passionately believe in what we do for people and organisations and having experienced us in his previous company this newly appointed COO also knew that we…

I bang a drum about established change models not being appropriate for the digital age. And what better way to speak about management than to use a digital age analogy. The story goes like this… Hierarchies are single points of failure. Decisions further up an organisation are binary. 0 or…

It’s not how you say it, it’s what you say. The Queen’s Speech is out and we may have read it. But what are the themes contained within it? Using the Miascape Text Analysis system we fired the text through and below are the top 20 things mentioned. This is…

“Bin lorry cameras to combat rough sleeper deaths”, says a report made today by the BBC on Biffa’s Tim Standring’s initiative to prevent the inclusion of homeless people in collected waste. This is a great example of not making the problem bigger. Surely the issue is one of why homeless people are sleeping in the waste containers in the first place? I am not making a political statement just illustrating how we celebrate sub-optimisation of problems.

Politics is interesting. It is management teams played out in the public eye and this week we had an amazing example of how disunity causes chaos with the Farage leadership news headlines. One of the things I coach teams on constantly is argue, debate, challenge and explore in the privacy of your organisation, team or group in an open and honest way. Decide on the way forward and then communicate that alignment. Once the leadership group leave the meeting room, metaphorically and physically it is extremely poor practice for staff or your reporting team to be able to identify differences in the leadership team. Disunity leads to disengagement and disinterest; not to mention loss of credibility of the leadership team.

I’m not a brilliant gardener but I love cooking fresh, local — preferably home grown — produce. In my head I feel like I should be an excellent gardner. …

Reaction. That’s what. Reaction is the single biggest reason that individuals, families, groups, teams, organisations and even countries don’t progress. Have you ever really wanted to do something in your life? Maybe it was a new sport, a course on something that you are interested in or a new hobby…

People who know me know that I am fairly into health and well being. I take food and exercise seriously both for myself and my family. I care about where and how food is produced and I am constantly questioning what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ for me and…