I work with a local artist who is turning his watercolour skill into a source of revenue. A successful watercolour business, we are finding (not surprisingly), is first of all, a successful business. He is really good at watercolour. Jim Collins asks “what are we passionate about? Well, this is what he is passionate about. [...]
We think we are open-minded. We assume we see all perspectives on an issue in a balanced, fair and Solution-Focused way. However research by Herbert Simon shows this not to be true. Our capacity to think freely is always bound by what we already know. And new ideas push us into the realm of resistance [...]
There is real skill required to build warm relationships at the same time as you manage people to achieve high levels of delivery. It is easy to be either a nice ineffectual leader or a ruthless driver. It is a lot more difficult to drive and build appropriate relationships at the same time. And this [...]
In the movie “Groundhog Day” Phil get’s stuck in a time loop and gets to relive the same day over and over. He tries different ways to fill his time. Eventually, tired of the repetition, he finds that not even suicide can get him out of the loop. it’s a very old movie, a classic, [...]
There is a story about a man driving down the road when a woman comes past the other way screaming at him “PIG, PIG”. He looks round and makes a rude gesture at her and as he turns back he runs into a pig in the middle of the road. OK it is not a [...]
We avoid dealing with issues by splitting and projection. Melanie Klein, a student of Freud, identified our ability to manage the anxiety of reality by disowning our crises. As an infant, we could not face the terror of a mother not being available to us or worse still, being angry with us. To deal with [...]
This is Kurt Lewin. He is recognised by many as the father of social psychology. His family moved from a town in modern Poland to Berlin. He studied in Freiberg and was wounded fighting in the German Army in WWI. In 1933 he left Germany and settled in the USA. He developed psychological models still [...]
"At StrategyWorks we craft the strategic conversation, in all of its expected and unexpected shapes and colours." That’s my elevator pitch. It's my response to the question: “So what do you do?” My mini cliff-hanger. One of the ‘unexpected shapes’ turns out to be how the client answers this question. The topic of value proposition [...]
A mason was asked “what are you doing?” He said “can’t you see I am chipping stone” and carried on hammering in a lacklustre way. When asked the same question, another mason replied “I am building a cathedral” and continued hammering joyfully away. I have always been a little sceptical of this story. It sounds [...]
Just about every board-game is developed around a simple principle. We love a sense of progress and are bothered by setbacks. We get a kick out ascending a ladder and are frustrated by having to slide down a snake. Dr Anna Tarrant from whom I took the illustration has used this principle quite creatively in [...]
