Blog

We have been using narrative approaches for many years to help organisations with employee engagement. This 4 minute youtube video gives some insights into some of the things we’ve notice working in this field and some examples of behaviours that can build or undermine engagement. In 2009, we also posted a detailed description of how […]

I stumbled across a blog post yesterday from Bob Sutton where he referred to the ‘Otis Redding Problem‘. This is where you put in place too many metrics to measure individuals, teams, or business units. meaning they can’t even think about all of them at once. They therefore end-up doing what they believe are important […]

When we collect stories in companies one of the most common anecdotes is the one about the boss who fails to recognise their staff’s work. People want to be thanked, appreciated, recognised regardless of their level in the organisation or their level of skill or expertise. Dan Ariely conducted a simple experiment described in his […]

“If you go into a grey concrete box with one little window, it’s claustrophobic, it’s cold. If you put a skylight in it and you make the window bigger and put a tree outside and put wood on the floor, it gets better. And it can get better and better until it becomes a humanistic […]

Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John D. Smith I’m often the technology steward for communities of practice (CoP). I create the Ning spaces and configure ‘em, I setup the email lists, I work out whether we should have a wiki or a blog or a discussion forum or […]

Late last year, a company approached us on the topic of employee engagement. They’d received the results of their biannual engagement survey and, as with previous years, realised that the data pointed them to strengths and potential weaknesses but didn’t help understand what was really going on, or what to do about it. The data […]

Last year I wrote about how the skill to apologize will become even more valuable as the world get even more complex and speedy. Things will go wrong. Well it looks like some books are being published on the topic. Here’s what Tom Peters has discovered. In What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: […]

To paraphrase Annette Simmons, “People won’t listen to you until they know who you are and what you want.” And one of the best ways to introduce yourself and answer these two questions is to tell a story that reveals something about your character and experience. The challenge for many people, however, is to find […]

To change the way we work we need to change our mental models, and that requires insight. In The Neuroscience of Leadership David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz describe how our improved understanding of the brain is helping to reorient how we design organisational change initiatives. The article recommends leaders create situations where their people get […]

I’m sure you have plenty of things to read and another stream of information is the last thing you are interested in. But for those who just want more I discovered Google Reader enables me to share posts which I might not ever make a comment about. Here is the link.