We tend to talk about complexity as something “out there”. A wicked problem to solve, a mess to order, a source of overwhelm and confusion to eliminate. And while it is all these things, it is also our home territory. Our habitat. And it IS us. It is easy to…

These last few weeks, I have felt out of sorts. It’s hard to find words for it; the best I can come up with is that life feels “scratchy”. The image that comes to mind is a snake that needs to shed its skin. Interestingly, many of my friends feel…

Being really and truly lost triggers primal survival anxieties. Michael Bond writes: “Lost is a cognitive state: your internal map has become detached from the external world, and nothing in your spatial memory matches what you see. But at its core, it is an emotional state. …

Life is complex: an ever-changing tangle of joy and pain, failure and success, beauty and despair. Sometimes it sucks, like watching your mother fade away into dementia, or losing a beloved dog. …

Where do confidence and trust come from? How do we develop faith in ourselves and others? And what role does complexity play in all of this? These are questions a client recently asked me to develop a workshop around as they have found it increasingly difficult to cultivate trust and…

Growing up in Africa, I’ve always been a nature lover and keen birder. So, I dreamed of creating a garden that would be a haven for wildlife in the middle of the city. Our neighbourhood was brand new when we built our house in 2001, so there were no established…

Co-authored with Michael Göthe. As we emerge from the exceptional conditions of the pandemic, the topic of distributed work (WFH or work from anywhere) vs on-site at the office has been the hot topic during client meetings and lunch discussions at training events. There are always many differing, even divergent…

Update: Before reading on, a warning. ChatGPT creates references out of thin air and presents them with great confidence as factual. You cannot trust a reference provided by the bot, you HAVE to double check. I found non-existant papers attributed to real authors; real papers attributed to the wrong authors…

There are about 10 unfinished blog posts that I try to avoid seeing every time I open my laptop. Every time I sit down to write, I end up with half-finished paragraphs. …