Over the years I’ve shown a clever little animation in our workshops to illustrate our propensity to tell ourselves stories when things are ambiguous and unclear. It’s how we make sense of the world. But in running this video, perhaps hundreds of times, I think I’ve discovered another interesting use for it. It seems to give […]

What do your organisational values actually mean? Do you have a list of 4, 5, 6 one-word, abstract concepts such as integrity, responsive and agile that represent your values? You might even have a few paragraphs describing each value. Most organisations I’ve worked with have something similar and it hasn’t helped them that much. These […]

People judge their leaders by how their actions align with their words. And how aligned these two things are then triggers stories that get told, and retold, across the organisation. People are looking to see how the messages they hear from their leaders in corporate communications, presentations, and in the organisation’s espoused values actually align […]

When asked for the secret of his success in the steel industry, American industrialist Charles Schwab (1862-1939) always talked about using praise, not criticism, giving liberal bonuses for work well done, and “appeal[ing] to the American spirit of conquest in my men, the spirit of doing things better than anyone has ever done them before.” […]

In using story-work to build a brand, engage employees, or for one of its many other purposes, organisations nearly always focus on storytelling. The meme is strong because the act of storytelling is so powerful. But to focus solely on this one aspect of story-work severely limits the benefits. The most valuable application of this […]

How do you get your people to think about what the future could be, in a way that inspires them and starts to spark action, but also takes into account the simple fact that the future is unpredictable? I was reminded of this challenge, yet again, last week. We were working with a client on […]

I heard this story from one of our workshop participants. We were talking about values and how they play out in practice. Their organisation, a government department, has ‘fun’ as a stated value. With that in mind Janet (not her real name) thought it would be fun to take her team on an outing to […]

So called ‘motivational speakers’ don’t motivate people to change behaviour. Throughout my career I have been involved in organising, planning and developing a huge number of away days, events, conferences and the like. When you start working on ideas for the agenda, more often than not someone will suggest getting a ‘motivational speaker’ along. This […]

My engineering friends would say it like this … good intentions are a necessary but insufficient condition for success. In my working life I have only ever met a handful of people who deliberately set out to humiliate, disempower, demotivate or otherwise disengage staff. Yet these are exactly the effects that many managers/leaders have. How […]

Is really listening to someone about your listening abilities, or is it about your motivation to listen? Is it about the ‘skills’ of listening or is it the desire to want to listen that makes the difference? I have been running a series of workshops lately where we do a very simple listening exercise that […]