Creativity & Climate (Engine)
I'd avoided starting the podcast for over a decade, then gave it one weekend in a tiny, noisy Airbnb. I planned fifty episodes and recorded twenty-three. On fear, constraint, and why a change of place doesn't change who you are - it just leaves you nowhere to hide.
Idea to Value (Physics)
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.
Creativity & Climate (Engine)
On noticing as a trainable discipline, how creative practice sharpens it, and the craft of helping others see what you've seen.
Idea to Value (Physics)
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.
Learning & Practice (Flywheel)
There are two ways to learn anything: taking in information, and doing the thing. On why you need both, and why a teacher beside you beats either.
Orientation & Direction (Map)
Time blocking looks like controlling time. Used well, it's the opposite: a way of seeing where your time actually goes
Creativity & Climate (Engine)
Around the year 170, the most powerful man alive sat down and wrote himself a weary note about the difficult people he'd meet that day. The Meditations was never intended as a book - it was a leader's journal.
Idea to Value (Physics)
We admire what design looks like and miss what it does. Design isn't how work looks. It's how work works — and it's how ideas become value.
Creativity & Climate (Engine)
She'd been doing most of the job for a year. They hired someone in over her - the following day she updated her CV.
Idea to Value (Physics)
Sheffield, 6am, a hot coffee and a helter-skelter — and a thought about work. Why the same problems keep coming back, why it's almost never the people, and a few things to try when new faces keep producing the same familiar results.
Creativity & Climate (Engine)
A company once sent every employee a hamper and champagne just before its engagement survey. The scores were excellent. Then everything went back to normal.
Creativity & Climate (Engine)
John Wooden’s legacy wasn’t built on winning alone. It was built on behaviour, teaching, and an unwavering belief that how you show up each day matters more than the scoreboard.