Collaboration works… until it doesn’t. When collaboration breaks down, staff are often encouraged to join training courses on how  to collaborate better. The underlying assumption is that people who don’t collaborate well don’t know how to.   But what if the problem lied somewhere else? Our insight is that when collaboration breaks down, it’s often because people have different views on why  they should collaborate. And why  they shouldn’t.     For example, members of global

Wannabe more successful dealing with people? There’s a lot to learn from our brain’s history… Warning: disturbing conclusions!     Here goes: compared to our ancestors’ brains who roamed the planet some 20,000 years ago, our brains are about 10% smaller. Yes, smaller . Quite the opposite to so many of the grandiose visions we have of ourselves and the evolution of mankind.      Back then, early homo sapiens were stuck in the middle of the ice-age, probably wishing for some gl

We're closing 2023 and starting 2024 and we're hearing lots of people asking what to wish for in these troubled times? Psychologist...

All businesses need to get things done. Failing that, there’s no delivery of products, services, or help (if you’re a non-profit). And if your organisation can do this with less steps or less effort, it has an edge, a real competitive advantage. That's one major reason why simplifying a business’ organization, processes, products, or management practices is important. But how do you get your business to think simpler, especially if you’re not the CEO? 1. Showcase the probl

When pressured on profits, many companies revert to budget cuts (choose your %), hire freezes (usually indefinite) and total travel bans. Sounds familiar? This trilogy’s become so widespread you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s the miracle cure to declining profits. Yet, while it all sounds quite plausible, deep down, we know it rarely adds up. The problem with this trilogy is it’s simplistic. That is, treating a rather complex problem as if it were much simpler than it rea

‘Blind man without a pension’ said a sign in front of a beggar’s feet. Lucky for this poor fellow, French writer Jacques Prévert walked...

Mark Twain (pictured above) once famously said: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter so I wrote a long one instead”. In Twain’s...

Simplicity can be a matter of life or death. Take emergency service procedures, weapons handling instructions or medical device manuals: they must be clear and easy to understand. Or else someone ends up dead. In business, verbosity also leads to death: witness all the corporate strategies, transformation programs and digital campaigns that end up disappearing. Why? Very often because they just felt too complicated for people to engage with. It’s not that these changes were