Change is inevitable – for individuals, businesses, communities and nations. Your only choice is how you work with it – it’s as simple as that. We look at how to make change work for you and your business. There are essentially two types of change: Attraction-based change – where you see a better future and pursue it. Crisis-based change – where some disaster befalls you and you have to change. Attraction-based… read more →
Fight, flight or freeze? This article looks at what you need to know about your brain to get you through a crisis. Faced with a crisis at work do you fight it out, freeze, or run in the opposite direction? If you want to be more in control, you need to understand what’s happening in your head. What’s going on in your head in a crisis? Put simply, this is… read more →
This article looks at the current crisis in politics and suggests 7 do’s and don’ts for leaders everywhere. Leadership in the political parties is currently in meltdown. Right now it feels like we’re in the middle of a rather surreal case study, and there are some serious lessons about leadership to think about. Regardless of how you voted in the referendum, you might agree with us that we are seeing… read more →
Do you find yourself complaining that you spend much of your time ‘firefighting’? It’s seems to be one of the diseases of the busy times we live in. But what do we mean by ‘firefighting’ – and if it’s such a problem, why don’t we just stop doing it? Firefighting is ‘the practice of dealing with problems as they arise rather than planning strategically to avoid them.’ This is unavoidable… read more →
Every day in the papers we read about some ‘crisis’ or another. This is particularly true at the moment, with both localised and global security factors affecting many aspects of our lives. To understand how we react to a crisis, it’s useful to understand what goes on in your head. Your brain evolved in layers. The first, primitive, layer is sometimes known as your ‘fish brain’, the next, mammalian layer,… read more →
For most people, a simple definition of a crisis is “the moment my brain stops functioning.” Your brain evolved in layers. The first, primitive, layer is your “fish brain”, the next, mammalian layer, is the “dog brain”, and finally you have the frontal lobes, which we know as your “human brain”. Depending on how stressful you find a crisis, the first to stop is your ‘human brain’, impacting thinking and… read more →
To get 2014 off to a positive start, we are challenging the notion that we’re (still) in a crisis and there’s nothing we can do about it. If you take a quick look at the business stories that have headlined in the past week, you can find the following: Supermarket woes drag down FTSE M&S suffers fall in clothing sales Dire day for UK high street as retailers reveal poor… read more →
One of the ways in which your business is defined is how you react when things go wrong. In an increasingly digital environment, transparency is inevitable, with the implication that you can no longer sweep mistakes under the carpet. Whilst we can learn how to use digital openness and its cousin, transparency, to make a positive impact on a business’ authenticity, it is also how we choose to respond when… read more →
Maintaining a positive outlook in a downturn is incredibly important to individuals whose jobs have evaporated or to businesses whose work has dwindled. It’s not as easy as it sounds, as the many who’ve lost their jobs in the past year know. Workers and home-office inhabitants alike have seen their golden parachutes turn bronze, and watched employee severance packages shrivel. Venture capital and small business financing have also dried up.… read more →