Seeing innovation Roland at NESTA writesI firmly believe that the solutions to many (if not all) of our innovation problems are already out there somewhere; it's just that we need to get much better at finding them. We all know that too...

Doing by Not Doing Neil Perkin highlights this video of a talk by conductor Itay Talgam. Talgam compares a variety of conducting styles as examples of leadership and explains how control gets in the way of relationship and creativity. If you don't have...

Cynicism Chris Corrigan has an excellent post on dealing with cynicism, inspired by Euan Semple's mini-rant against pomposity. Snippet:I have recently had the experience of people saying to me that the work I do would never work with such-and-such a group...

The way the cookie crumbles I've been thinking about a couple of cookie-related stories I've noticed recently. I blogged the first a while back ago: Bob Sutton found this nugget in this reportOne of the simplest and yet most fascinating experiments to test the thesis...

The management myth I enjoyed Matthew Stewart's polemic against management education in The Atlantic. He recounts his success in management based on a mixture of philosphy and... winging it. After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of...

We complete each other I wanted to say a little more about Matthew May's work on creative elegance. Matt's eloquent challenge is this:Conventional wisdom says that to be successful, an idea must be concrete, complete, and certain. But what if that’s wrong? What if...

Another day of noticing Kay Scorah and I enjoyed our first Day of Noticing workshop in Dublin in March. We had some very positive feedback from our first set of participants. So now we're taking bookings for London on June 15th. Here's a bit...

The pitfalls of buy-in and action planning Quite often in meetings there´s a big assumption that we must end with action planning, without which the event will be deemed unproductive. Action planning has its place, and Chris Corrigan has a good post looking at some choices in...

Which pool would you swim in? Rob put up a great post the other day making a whole load of challenging points about how see the world. I want to pick a couple of his images to make a slightly narrower point about meetings and how...

Time to act and learn There's a lot to chew on in Chris Corrigan's latest post, Leading from a platform of reverence, but this part particularly struck me today:We have time only to act and learn. We don’t have time to create a long term...

Noticing In Dublin last week, Kay Scorah and I ran our first Day of Noticing Workshop. Kay and I are good friends but we've not actually run anything together before and it was great to do so, and to share some...

Commitment ceremonies When facilitating, I'm keen to avoid what I call commitment ceremonies. There's often pressure as workshops/awaydays near a close for some process that gets people to agree on what actions need to happen and who's going to be responsible for...

Mystery Some wise words from Richard Oliver:Creativity is often described as a problem-solving activity. The problem with problem-solving is that it focuses on what is rather than what could be. If we want to do things differently rather than better we...

Child's play? I found this site very thought-provoking: Give us back our game. It argues that kids' football has been spoiled by the over-active participation of adults.Today's children learn from the grown-ups . Without the freedom of the streets, their early experiences...

Play matters Here's a great TED talk by Stuart Brown on the serious importance of play. The opening story about how a polar bear and husky opt for play instead of predation is pretty amazing. And I loved these lines: "nothing lights...