Serendipitous Conversations

Last week I was waiting at the station for a train to make a trip to a nearby town. For a change I decided not to take the car. Whilst waiting, a gregarious Glaswegian starting chatting to a man and a woman standing nearby. They ended up talking enthusiastically about the music scene in Glasgow

The Human Library

Brain Filler and Blogging

“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best

Benefitting From Quality Relationships

Therapist Esther Perel on the importance of relationships: “Life will present you with unexpected opportunities, and you won’t always know in advance which are the important moments. Above all, it’s the quality of your relationships that will determine the quality of your life. Invest in your connections, even those that seem inconsequential.” Source: Tribe of

Quantitative Versus Qualitative Research

I was once asked to find out how lessons learned in bids and projects were captured and shared in a large company. There were two approaches, a standard IT one that identified company-wide portals and databases, number of users/reports/views, ease of use etc. The other was to interview a selected group of people, partly to

Speaking Skills And The Liking Gap

I came across this recently (from the blog of Ed Batista, who is a business coach): “A mental model I held about myself for years was that I was a poor public speaker. I’d get nervous before a presentation or speech, I interpreted my sweaty palms and the pit in my stomach as evidence of

A Key To Problem Solving

I came across this interesting tweet from @theresiatanzil: “The difficult part of problem solving is rarely about coming up with the solution, but rather 1) getting people to agree what the problem is,2) which solution we decide to try,3) how to coordinate and work together to solve it, and4) committing to keep it solved.” It’s

Books And Their Conversations

“The book you are reading – as I would guess is the case with most books – is the result of many conversations I’ve had over the course of many years, in my case with both humans and nonhumans. Many of them happened while I was writing this, and all of them changed my mind.

Thinking Allowed

“We live in a culture that tends to view thought with a degree of suspicion. Thinking is frequently associated with uselessness, idleness, laziness. These suspicions can be somewhat allayed when thinking can be directly tied to some kind of purpose or tangible result, of course. Accordingly, we tend to conceptualize thinking in terms of learning.

Dialogue Versus Discussion

How much dialogue do you have a day? See here.