Why aspirational values differ, sometimes drastically, from behavioural values The theme of Toronto Change Days 2019 was ‘Living Values’, and through the course of the ‘unconference/celebration’ of change, participants used the HowSpace conference app to enter their top five values four times: before the conference started, and then in increments throughout the weekend. Word Clouds […]
We feel the need to be able to ‘trust’ the people we work or collaborate with to feel safe to grow and learn and succeed. One presentation at Berlin Change Days 2017, whose theme was ‘Power & Trust’, gave eight ‘pillars of trust’: honesty, reliability, transparency, clarity, credibility, fairness, keeping promises and respect. But the […]
From ‘Who Do You Trust?’ to ‘How Do You Trust?’ Trust is a beautiful thing. The tether of all relationships, it is a fundamental human need to trust and be trusted. For this very reason trust also becomes a lever by which operators gain power over people who trust too much. We trust too much […]
How to Play Trust for Power The theme of Berlin Change Days 2017 was ‘Trust & Power’. One of the earliest exercises of the weekend conference was on the nature of trust and much was made of its significance in positive transformation. When I think about trust I initially think of how liberating it is. […]
“Curiosity… is insubordination in it’s purest form.” – Vladamir Nabakov It’s becoming increasingly common for leadership coaches and innovation experts to espouse the benefits, and even necessity, of curiosity. And yet we also know, as I explained in a previous post, that education systems and workplaces typically discourage curiosity. Why is this? What is it about […]
“How does it feel when you are searching for the possible answer.” – Matthias Gruber Curiosity: NeuroChemical Learning Overdrive Probably the most exciting frontier of psychological research today is the field of neurobiology. With an exponentially rapidly evolving panoply of new tools with which to observe the brain in action and analyze its chemistry and network […]
“The important thing is not to stop questioning… Never lose a holy curiosity.” – Albert Einstein Probably the two things we associate most with curiosity are children and questioning. We remember childhood as a time of openness and inquisitiveness, we observe children approaching even the most mundane things with a sense of awe and wonder, […]
“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” – Albert Einstein The World Economic Forum – backed by an outpouring of mildly panic stricken white papers from big name organisational consultancies (1) – hails our era as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We are already riding the rising wave of an increasingly complex fusion […]
So, ‘disruption’ is no ordinary change. Nor is it the change necessarily resulting from an innovation, which is where we see it used so often today in entrepreneurial circles. While a new and innovative idea may have a significant impact, does it actually ‘rupture’ something? If an organisation can adapt to the innovation – by changing tactics, by buying it up, by hiring expertise – it’s not ‘disruptive’.
Spasm & Splinting So, I threw my back out… Again… I planted somewhere over a million trees in an evidently overlengthy treeplanting career, once upon a time rowed a dory down the coast of BC, and, for a time, took great pleasure in something called ‘Martial Dance’ which involved improvisationally and consensually flinging one another […]