Blog
Take a look at recent insights in leadership, strategy and more.
The obscure art of sense-making
Sense‑making is a vital but often overlooked leadership skill – the ability to develop a shared understanding of complex situations and decide wisely. In times of change and uncertainty, the way leaders and teams interpret information shapes the strategies they choose. Clearer sense‑making leads to better decisions, stronger alignment, and more effective action.
You can’t control your way to alignment
Getting a team or organisation pulling in the same direction isn’t about more control – it’s about genuine commitment. Trying to tighten oversight and meetings often creates compliance, not alignment. Real alignment comes from finishing strategic debates, building trust, and enabling self‑organising, coherent behaviour that drives momentum.
The (foregone) opportunity of dialogue at large events
A series of well-informed and insightful speakers with some Q&A can make for a great event. An even better one might involve getting the “audience” to do some of the talking. Usually, the assembled company are well-informed and insightful too, if not perhaps quite...
Reading the manual – understanding human interaction
I’m not the first to say this, I know, but it’s worth repeating: We gain from learning to understand more about how people interact. Many of us are never really taught this – certainly not in any systematic way. This gap – and opportunity – is especially true in...
What’s your habitual time unit of focus? And is it the only one you need?
What’s your habitual time unit of focus? An hour, a day, a week, a month – or more – or less? What quantum of time do you block out for a singular, intense task? Probably all intervals of time have their place, depending on what you need to get done, though, of...
Time management for big projects
How effective is your time management, especially when it comes to big, difficult, daunting goals? Checklist and fresh insights available One step at a time – we know that’s the way to get something big done. But is that all there is to it? For something practical, I...
Managers are chosen; leaders emerge
Management involves the skilful exercise of formal authority derived from appointment to a position of power. Leadership, on the other hand, rests on the ability to influence people, often through commitment to a worthy aim. Managers are appointed, leaders choose...
Closing the gaps
Up and coming managers and leaders need to see the gaps in their approach. In the old saying, what got them where they are today won’t get them where they need to be tomorrow. In fact, they might even need to unlearn some things that have seemed central to their way...
Managing distractions
…especially significant ones we care about. Last year, I allowed too much of my capacity, especially my reading capacity, to be taken up following the news—hoping for some signs of sense prevailing, especially in Britain and America, frankly. Sense in these contexts...
Wasting energy?
We all like a bit of freedom—the chance to act on our own initiative. Much of the time that’s a good thing. Recently, however, I’ve been noticing just how much energy can be wasted if everyone is pulling in different directions in an organisation, even if they’re...
Learning or doing, which is the priority?
We need to keep learning e.g. about people; and we need to keep doing or delivering e.g. in a business. So which is more important? Delivering perhaps (it’s certainly likely to be more urgent), but what if the delivery is weak because we haven’t yet learned some...
Refined or just reticent?
Or is it just natural human reticence that most of us could do with overcoming (though some were never troubled in this way)? For many, we need to work at putting ourselves out there to be judged. It's uncomfortable, or seems so at first. But arguably it's part of the...
The subtlety is the point
Many situations seem to require being focused and broad at the same time; being specialist as well as generalist. That appears to be a contradiction, a dichotomy—one that needs very careful handling if a group of people is involved, and a considerable challenge to...
Setting and defending boundaries
Flexibility is a good thing. However... Sometimes—and about some things—we need to be inflexible: We need to have boundaries. We need to decide what we are going to accept and what we are not going to accept. Actually, we probably already know, deep down (we can tell...
Separating learning and evaluating
Learning something isn't the same as accepting it, necessarily. We don’t have to commit to agreeing with something before, or even as, we learn it. And often we can't evaluate some new piece of knowledge or a new skill properly until we have thoroughly understood...