Human behaviour will work around poor design, but it does so at a cost! I wanted the kitchen to be the centre of the house, where I could keep an eye on the garden, the children and comings and goings from the house. My husband wanted the kitchen to be a place where he...

We’re all spending so much time in online meetings, that it’s worth a little effort to use a virtual platform in the best ways we can. Here are some tips. You probably already know that it can help a meeting if everyone has their video on when possible (see key #2 in 7 Essential...

In ordinary times, meetings can run the gamut from dismal to invigorating. There is possibly even a wider range in this time of economic upheaval and physical distancing, when many of our “normal” practices for productive meetings are disrupted. Now with so many virtual meetings, how do we keep some of the spirit and...

Remember in-person meetings? When we would be in the same physical room with in-the-flesh people? If we’re fortunate, we had meetings where people established trust and rapport, respected and were curious about each other’s ideas, and thought creatively together. Or maybe meetings were occasionally like that, or we hoped they would be. Now with...

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds many businesses are being forced to make hard decisions. Not only are teams working remotely, leadership is triaging financial bleed through staff layoffs and restructuring. In many companies with a traditional top-down organisational structure, managers alone make these decisions without broad team consultation. Workers lower on the ladder have...

Dan Pink knows something about what motivates us. In this RSAnimate video he shares some surprising findings about what really moves us to perform better, to do our best, to stretch ourselves. His most general finding is that for all but purely mechanical tasks – that is, for anything that requires a bit of...

This is the third in a three-part series, and is an excerpt from a white paper by the same title. Part 1 and part 2 listed four pitfalls of a top-down organization: (1) communication goes one-way, (2) the person who makes the decisions creates a bottleneck, (3) management and workers become adversaries, and (4)...

Would you be surprised that the research on workplace effectiveness addresses the value of psychological safety? The notion of “psychological safety,” a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson,1 has been researched extensively over the years. Psychological safety in a work context relates to a person’s perspective on how threatening or rewarding...