We don’t just use words and language to name and describe things. More often than not our words are designed to do things: to direct; to evoke; to command; to unsettle and to pacify or calm – and much more!. As obvious as this may seem, and as central as it is to how we …
Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling “Questions are taken for granted rather than given a starring role in the human drama. Yet all my teaching and consulting experience has taught me that what builds a relationship, what solves problems, what moves things forward is asking the right questions.” “What we choose to …
Very often leaders find themselves in the kind of situations that have been described as “wicked problems” or “messes” or, increasingly, “complex”. Very often when they do they focus on identifying and defining the problem that needs to be solved and articulating a future state that needs to be achieved. There is a sense, …
For some years now my colleague Dr Garth Britton and I have been playing around with different ways of engaging with organisations and organisational leaders in circumstances where they know, or perhaps simply have an uneasy feeling, that things aren’t going the way they planned or that, to a greater or lesser degree, the wheels are falling off. Mostly when this …
Over the past ten years what I do and how I do it has changed significantly. One shift has been in the area of coaching. When I began in 2000 coaching was arguably just entering its second generation and moving from a focus on what might be called skills coaching, which grew out of sports …