Thanks to a recommendation from Benjamin Mitchell I’ve been listening to the Feeling Good Podcast by Dr. David Burns. Dr. Burns has what he calls The Five Secrets Effective Communication. At last week’s London Organizational Learning Meetup we were able to get a bit of practice applying these secrets, in particular those related to empathy. Dr. […]
In Action Science workshops I teach a technique I call Coherence Busting. To understand why it is useful I ask the audience to imagine themselves making a proposal: “While you are talking you notice the main stakeholder — the person in the audience you most hope to persuade — glance at their watch. What do […]
Saturday, January 2, 2016
At a certain point in reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast & Slow I realized I had discovered a possible explanation for the mystery of “museum sleepies”. Museum sleepies is my wife‘s term for the fatigue we feel after a rather short time in a museum, a term we’ve used much more frequently since moving to London. I know this is […]
Thursday, October 22, 2015
None of us like to be wrong. I’ve tested this with many audiences, asking them “how does it feel when you’re wrong?” “Embarrassing”, “humiliating” or simply “bad” are among the most common answers. Stop now and try and think of your own list of words to describe the feeling of being wrong. These common and […]
Last week at the August session of the London Action Science Meetup we started with a discussion of the phrase “the story I’m making up…” I love this phrase! It captures the process of the Ladder of Inference, but it has an immediate emotional resonance that the ladder does not. I came across this phrase from […]
I had great fun with my Devopsdays Amsterdam talk and the video is now online, joining the slides that I posted previously. The last time I spoke at a Devopsdays was London 2013 (video here). That was another fun talk, and had some overlap in content, but I did feel that I tried to put […]
I’ve just delivered my talk Frustrated? It is probably your fault at Devopsdays Amsterdam. That means my slides must be finished! Here they are to download, and I’m looking forward to the video being posted later.
This year I’m training people in the theories of Chris Argyris, helping them to apply the concepts, and this raised some fun challenges. The challenge on my mind today is how to convince people that practice will be required before they can perform well? My current analogy is the piano. After a quick search I can show you a […]
That’s the title of my talk which has been accepted to the program for the upcoming Devopsdays Amsterdam June 24th, 25th and 26th. The topics I’ll be discussing will be familiar to the attendees of the London Action Science meetup — and to the people who have been diligently reading my session notes — which is that if […]
On March 25th the London Action Science Meetup held a session on Using the two column case study. In our previous session we introduced some of the fundamental ideas of Action Science, and then closed with an exercise based on the two-column case study. This time we started by creating our two-column cases, used them to […]