Creativity & Climate (Engine)

Every workplace runs on rules — the only question is whether they're written where everyone can see them, or unwritten and known only to the insiders. Why explicit rules are fairer, kinder to newcomers, and freer than unspoken norms.

Mix the right skills, personalities and behaviours and you get a team — or, really, you get batter. Something still has to add the heat. On motivating a team: the kinds of energy a leader can apply, and which ones actually cook.

We like to believe what we wear doesn't matter. It does — and not only in how others read us, but in how we perform ourselves. On the research into clothing, confidence and "enclothed cognition", and the small wardrobe of triggers I use to change gear.

Every space teaches you how to behave in it - long before you decide. On environmental affordance, dedicated spaces, and designing a workspace (even a kitchen corner) for the work you actually want to do.

The old Japanese proverb, the little weighted doll behind it (and the Weebles), and what resilience actually turns out to be — once you stop mistaking it for strength.

Every piece of work has a rhythm — a beat of push and recover, open and closed. On learning to hear it, in your day, your team, or a whole company — and why ignoring it quietly wears people out.

Images don't argue — they present. A practical essay on why visual thinking is underused at work, and how photographs unlock insights that language alone cannot reach.

A field recording in the barley, the real science on fluorescent flicker and daylight, and the small, cheap changes that bring some of the outside back into where we work.

While the midday sun baked the tourists, I took to the bar for a beer with the hotel manager, to find out how a large hotel full of British tourists actually runs. Hospitality is not software, or accounting, or architecture. But work is work.