Creativity & Climate (Engine)
Kitchen tables, rented desks, a damp garden shed that was never quite right. It took me a long time to see the problem wasn't me - it's that some spaces are built for thinking, and some for working. On why deliberate conditions matter, and how to build your own anywhere
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.