The success of our workshop lies in how we prepare for it. Now more than ever as we work remotely and digitally, it is important to create a seamless, friction- less and enjoyable experience for our participants.

What a workshop isn’t:  someone standing at the front of a room with a blank flipchart and a marker pen while people shout out ideas.

Here’s how to make a workshop fail: invite the same old team, put them in the same old meeting room, give them the same information, and ask them to brainstorm.  Likelihood of any ground-breaking ideas emerging? Almost zero…

What’s a chef without a knife? A gardener without a spade? A painter without paints? Every professional needs the right tools to do the job, and it’s no different when it comes to workshops.  

“If you’re alive, you’re a creative person.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

When you think about a great team you have been in, do you think about the work, or do you think about the people you worked with? For me, it’s the people. 

How would you describe your team at work?  Are they a group of professionals who do their best to work well together to achieve their goals? 

The US team brought 9 sports psychologists to the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014.  Elite athletes are expected to be in peak physical condition, but they also substantially improve their competitive advantage with psychological training.  

There are lots of tools and training courses for bosses on how to manage people, but we hardly ever talk about how people can manage their bosses.  “Managing up” is being able to speak up to your boss about how they can support you more, for example to ask for help, to share your concerns about your work or team, or even to ask them to change how they work.  

Since the pandemic, we’ve developed more productive ways of working.  Bosses have realised that people can be trusted to work from home well, which means we are likely to have more choices about where and when we work in future.  However, flexibility also means blurred boundaries, and when expectations aren’t clear it can be more stressful for employees and leaders.

Committees have been described as “a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled” (Barnett Cocks), and “a group that keeps minutes and loses hours” (Milton Berle). 

In a long yacht race, a 10-person crew sail together for up to a week, 24/7. Crew members work in shifts, with an intensive three hours on deck followed by three hours of sleep, on repeat until they cross the finish line. 

The best teams behave respectfully towards each other, no matter who we are working with, how pressured the work is or how senior we are.  Bullying and bad behaviour are terrible for team spirit and lower team performance.  So why are there still bullies around?  Because we don’t intervene early enough.

What I’ve learned about writing a business book.
In summer 2019 I’d reached a bit of a “meh” moment.  I had been working on my second business book proposal for over a year, and just couldn’t get it right.

The police have targets to measure their performance, and over the last decade have moved away from output-based targets to outcome-based ones.  If police targets were based purely on how many arrests are made, they would be ignoring the fact that arresting people does not deal with the causes of crime.  

I recently gave a talk to a group of Kickstarter training young people who are just starting out in their careers. Here’s the advice I gave them – and more advice my colleagues added.