Category: Inspiration

I spent some of last week trying to get back into a kayak after snorkelling. Not gracefully. I was all arms, legs, and swearwords. I still have blisters on my hands from paddling and at one point I found myself apologising to my kayak. But not to my wife who was laughing from the front…

Two little words could transform your team’s culture overnight. I have spent years watching ideation sessions get suffocated by common phrases like “No, because” and “Yes, but…” On the surface, both sound polite and professional. But in truth, both are corporate compliance mechanisms used to kill a fragile new concept before it even has a…

It’s one of my all-time favourite moments in a workshop. At a gathering for an organisation’s financial leaders, I asked everyone to identify a topic or skill they needed to understand better to prepare for what lies ahead. Most of the Finance Directors in the room came up with complex subjects. They mentioned ‘things’ like…

The latest 2026 Gallup State of the Global Workplace report has some sobering headlines. Global employee engagement has dropped to just 20%, marking the first time in history we’ve seen two consecutive years of decline: Or to put it another way, 80% of employees do not feel fully engaged in their work. This is more…

I spent my week between a fast-paced tech company in Manchester and a wonderful group of NHS health professionals in Maidstone. On the surface, these two worlds have very little in common. But look closer, and you will see they are both wrestling with the same invisible enemy: the need for perfection. In the tech sector,…

It feels like many professionals I talk to have perfected the art of the busy day. Their working routine appears to be a frantic rollercoaster of calendar Tetris (other time-draining distractions are available), multiple concurrent chat sessions, and endless email ping-pong. Even turning up to meetings five minutes late has become a perverse badge of…

Last week, an Edubrain survey of 3,500 Americans aged 18-60 uncovered something many of us have long suspected. Many adults, just like schoolchildren, are surprisingly willing to outsource thinking to anyone or anything that will do it for them. Yes, I’m talking about AI, and the damage it is already doing to our collective cognitive…

I recently considered hiring a high-priced strategy coach to help me navigate the ever-shifting Motivational Speaking industry, but I’ve decided to go in a different direction. I’m taking up cromniomancy. For the uninitiated—and I assume that is most of you—this is the ancient and noble art of interpreting the sprouting pattern of an onion to…

“If ever there is a misnomer, it’s change management. It rarely causes change—and it’s almost always mismanaged.” That cutting observation comes from Phil Gilbert, the former head of design at IBM. If, like me, you’ve sat through a ninety-minute “vision deck” presentation, only to go back to your desk and carry on exactly as before,…

We’ve all heard the old chestnut: “People don’t like change.” It’s the go-to excuse whenever a new system rollout goes belly-up or the team looks at you with sheer horror when you suggest throwing out the half-dead office pot plant. But I don’t buy it. If we truly hated change, we wouldn’t take holidays, we’d…