All episodes

This reflection episode gives you three practices for better decision making and accountability taking in your team.

The first is Leaving Traces: Three questions answered at the moment you decide, and a review date set whatever the outcome, so a decision can be judged on how it was made.

The second is Holding Still: Where to set the next responsibility, determine the risks worth stepping in for, and let people succeed on their own.

The third is Thinking Out Loud: What to add when you communicate a decision, and what to ask when someone brings one to you. This practice...

Think of the best and the worst decision you've ever made. Most of us sorted them by how they turned out, not by how we decided. That's outcome bias, and it doesn't stop at our own heads. It runs through how organisations judge decisions, distribute credit and place blame.

In this episode I look at what happens when the people who decide are not the people who answer for it. A company buys a new system. In one version it works and nobody asks how the choice was made. In the other it doesn't, and suddenly everyone is looking for...

A family sits down and agrees that dinner is a phone-free time. Two weeks later, someone breaks the agreement. Tune in to hear what happens and why it matters for your team culture.

Every team has norms, whether anyone discussed them or not. They form out of what people do and what nobody stops. This episode is about two practices that I consider foundational for building a good team culture.

The first is a workshop you can run with your team to define your norms deliberately. I walk through how to run it and how to turn statements like "we...

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast." Peter Drucker never said or wrote it.
It became a popular claim anyway and we often read a good culture into it.
Read plainly, it doesn't say anything about which kind of culture beats a strategy.

This episode explores what that line actually claims, why the gap between stated and lived values is so common that most people read straight past culture statements.
I take a look at what happened after culture became a serious business topic in the 1980s and explore how Edgar Schein gave us a better understanding of how cultures form, transform,...

This reflection episode turns purpose and direction into two practices you can start this week. The first is about sensegiving and sensemaking. Three questions that build the line of sight between one person's job and who their work actually serves, and what to do with their answers once you have them.
The second is direction. Five moves that give people guidance without you standing over them, from agreeing on what good looks like to protecting your team's focus from the noise around it.

Both come with a way of understanding where to start. One job and one conversation for the...

Ask people what meaningful work is and you get very different answers, yet most of us would take a pay cut for work that has more of it.
This episode is about that gap, why purpose stays so fuzzy, and why it matters more than ever.

I look at two of the most influential management thinkers.
Peter Drucker, whose ideas about good management got reduced to a numbers game and William Edwards Deming, who was ignored at home and listened to abroad, and what both reveal about why good management frameworks cannot fix bad leadership.

This episode shows you why...

What is the foundation to becoming a great listener?
This is the reflection episode following The Talking Reflex. It's designed to be practised, not just listened to.
You'll hear a difficult conversation twice. Once with a manager who performs all the right listening moves and misses everything that matters, and once with a manager who actually wants to understand.
The difference between them is the intention the manager came with.

From there we get into two practices you can start using this week.
The intention check, which is about catching what you really want from a conversation before it runs...

Most managers are sure they listen well while their people don't feel heard.
This episode is about that gap, why it survives, and how it impacts us when we don't close it.

I look at the research on how we really listen, why active listening so often becomes a performance without understanding.
This episode shows you what the value of deep listening is.
I also look at the influence of power and organisation structures and company culture, and how AI is making the problem worse.
This is the main episode.
On Thursday, the reflection episode follows with practices to improve...

In the main episode I made the case that psychological safety is a key performance indicator, and that the way we handle AI adoption exposes and amplifies the leadership already in place.

This reflection episode is about what you can actually do about it with your own team.
I share two practices and one principle for building and protecting the environment where people feel safe to say where AI is helping and where it isn't.

The first practice is the muscle underneath all the others.
The second turns AI mistakes into collective learning and trains a team to protect their...

Season 2 opens with the practice that everything else depends on.
Most leaders treat psychological safety as a culture conversation.

Google's own research proved it is a key performance indicator and Amy Edmondson has uncovered its value for over 25 years. So why has so little changed?

In this episode I look at what happens when climates of fear meet the most consequential workplace decision organisations are currently making: AI adoption.
The Nokia story shows what calibrated silence cost a company that should have survived.
The Klarna reversal shows what happens when leadership confuses cost savings with value.
And recent...