Leadership and Work in Practice

On the PO method, lateral thinking, and why creativity was never a gift some people have. It's a device you can pick up off the nearest surface.

Months into a startup doubling year on year, the team was tiring in the messy middle. So I bought posh biscuits and ran a very different kind of workshop. On Appreciative Inquiry, and the discipline of studying success.

On business storytelling, and why facts inform but stories orient.

I discovered the Cornell Note-Taking Method over a decade ago and promptly ignored it. It sounded dull and academic. Then I tried it properly. I have not really stopped since.

For our anniversary, our local pub had just been told to cut costs by any means necessary. So they'd turned off the heating - one thing everyone was paying for. I got to watch a business raise its costs by trying to lower them, in real time, over a burnt lasagna.

In the startup, on any given day: customers calling, ops drowning in alerts, execs pinging chat. All of it communication - and all of it affected by noise. On the four kinds of noise, and why your message didn't land.

I once walked into a room and found a whiteboard headed "Our Most Hated Customers." On why service is never a department — it's a signal of how the whole organisation is actually built.

On noticing as a trainable discipline, how creative practice sharpens it, and the craft of helping others see what you've seen.

I use a children's puzzle to teach leaders about change. It sounds childish — but I have now run this workshop over 700 times, with teams as small as six and groups as large as 140. The pattern is always the same.