Category: insight
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Sacred Hours
Finding and creating space in busy schedules to write, try stuff out, make meaningful progress through deep work or just to take a step back to think seems to be more difficult than ever. It's certainly something that I've long struggled with. And I think working from home, the endless Zoom calls and the increasingly…
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When to Let Go
I loved this framing of situational leadership that came originally from Alice Chapman but was featured by Will Myddelton as a way of describing the challenge of knowing when to direct as a leader, and when to let go. Will describes how in his own leadership journey he was struggling to understand how to adapt…
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Google Firestarters Episode 4: Gareth Kay
Gareth Kay, co-founder at Chapter in San Francisco, in Google Firestarters Episode 4
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Google Firestarters Episode 3: Sue Unerman
I'm really happy to say that the third Google Firestarters video chat is now up. This one is with the brilliant Sue Unerman who was wonderfully erudite, funny and insightful. We talk about a wide range of subjects related to the industry including thoughts on implementing agile processes in an agency, continuous learning in life…
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Google Firestarters Episode 2: Lindsay Pattison
I'm delighted to announce episode 2 in our series of Google Firestarters chats – this one with the brilliant Lindsay Pattison, Chief Client Officer, WPP. The conversation with Lindsay was pretty wide-ranging but she had some fascinating thoughts around how the old delineation between agency types and roles is now less meaningful and about the…
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Learning from Football
I really liked this post from Chris Dillon on what football can teach us. He makes several great points talking about how great teams are the product of how the component parts (the players) collectively work together and how you can't read the properties of a collective simply from its individual elements. A great team…
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Complexity Bias, and Looking for Answers in the Wrong Places
I was thinking the other day about complexity bias, which Shane Parrish has described as: ‘…our tendency to look at something that is easy to understand, or look at it when we are in a state of confusion, and view it as having many parts that are difficult to understand.’ Counter-intuitively we often prefer to…
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Future-Back
I've done some backcasting before now in my work with clients but I liked the way this is framed in this article in terms of how most leaders think 'present-forwards' rather than 'future-back' 'Present-forward leaders build their organizations in increments, following the rules and procedures that work today. Future-back leaders, in contrast, visualize what their…
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The Problem With Behavioural Economics
Last Friday in between calls I dipped in and out of the brilliant Nudgestock (you can see all the talks over on the Ogilvy Consulting YouTube channel). A favourite talk that I caught from the day came from Bri Williams early on. One of the biggest challenges with behavioural economics (for me at least) is…
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Wardley’s Universal Doctrine
I'm a fan of Simon Wardley's thinking – he did an excellent Google Firestarters talk a few years ago, and I drew on some of his work in my first and second book. His approaches to understanding situational context and strategy with Wardley Mapping are exceptional. The doctrine have been described as value-based ideas and…