10Aug

Being decisive AND inclusive: How you can collaborate quickly

There’s a lot of talk about collaboration these days — and with it often comes a worry about making decisions. The more you try to include people and decide things together, the longer it all takes — right? Wrong! At least, it’s not necessarily so. People who want to be inclusive can easily get caught up by thinking: Everybody must agree; and Things shouldn’t happen before everyone’s been properly consulted. The trouble is, life simply isn’t like that. Decisions can’t always wait, and there’s always more than one solution because our minds are compulsively creative. The good news is that being properly inclusive and being swiftly decisive is actually quite easy(ish) as long as you keep a few simple rules. The first is to use the right decision making process for the right job. In my experience, there are three kinds of decision making: Decisions about purpose and meaning Decisions about strategy Decisions...
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22Feb

Books to help you work well with people

People are tricky.  We’ve got a lot of moving emotional parts, so we do well when we handle each other with care. Innocent mistakes are easily made and work can really suffer if things go wrong when we’re trying hard to get it right. The trouble is, the saying ‘you can’t please all of the people all of the time’ is true.  So how best to deal with that? I’ve spent 26 years studying people skills closely as I’ve helped people collaborate and build partnerships. This article is a quick share of some of the ‘go to’ books I recommend when coaching people in the art of leading together.  Hope you find them as useful as me. Humankind, a hopeful history by Rutger Bregman is a valuable read because it gives clear evidence in favour of having faith in others. Bregman puts the stories of mistrust and conflict that surround us...
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06Jul

More Energy, Less Stress — An Easy Guide to Better Quality Time

Don’t watch the clock, watch whatever you’re doing(First published in The Innovation on Medium here)Last time I baked, I burned the bread. Such a stupid mistake to make, and yet it’s so common. Watch the clock instead of the thing you’re doing, and things will often go wrong. I was paying attention to the wrong kind of time… If only I’d stuck to the principles of Open Space, it would all have worked out fine. Open Space started out as a “simple way to run productive meetings, for five to 2000+ people” which we quickly learned also turns out to be a “powerful approach to leadership”. I fell in love with the method 15 years ago, finding it so useful that besides using it to facilitate work, I regularly call on it’s wisdom in everyday life. There are just 4 principles and one ‘law’ in Open Space, and you don’t need to learn anything new or have...
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