I recently took my first business trip since the pandemic began. It was just a short overnight trip, from London to Düsseldorf and back. But the logistics, combined with the emotions, of the trip were as complicated as they were revelatory. I realise now that one of the biggest misnomers of this moment is the…
COVID-19 has impacted almost everyone on the planet; that is as incredible as it is irrefutable. Few shared experiences are so truly universal in nature. But it’s also true that how the pandemic affected us varies tremendously. On a national level, the decisions of state actors and individual citizens have had hugely different results in both how…
When the Pain Isn’t Worth the Gain: Putting Well-Being First There was nothing normal about the 2020 Olympics. First of all, it wasn’t in 2020 — postponed, like so much of life last year, due to the coronavirus. Ultimately, we saw a version that reflected much of the pandemic-based transformation we’ve seen elsewhere – far…
Are People Really Going Back to Work? Sort of – Understanding the Future of Remote Work. As the world has begun to open up, thanks to rising vaccinations and falling Covid rates – in most places – one thing seems clear. We’re not going back to normal, or back to 2019, or “back” to anything…
For most of us, when we recount a stressful situation, we emphasise the things that created an emotional response. We’ll not just talk through the substantive areas of a negative work assessment; we’ll mention how it was in the middle of the day, wrecking our focus for the rest of the afternoon. We don’t just…
A lot of 2020 was marked with uncertainty, from the mundane (will stores ever stock paper towels again?) to the momentous (when will there be a vaccine?). However, there were many vulnerabilities in our society that we knew already, that have played out in bright relief during COVID-19. The pandemic highlighted the disparate availability of…
Would You Apply for Your Current Job? Improve Your Organisation, for Yourself. There is no shortage of articles, blogs, surveys and talks about how to improve your organisation. They all make arguments for why you should make such improvements – to attract more millennials, accelerate digitalisation, compete in a global environment. . .and dozens of…
Over the years, I’ve returned a few times to the text of Steve Job’s 2005 Stanford commencement speech. It’s pretty well known but if you’ve never read it, I’d recommend it. There’s a lot in there (though it’s not very long) and I always find I see something different in there each time I read it,…
Most of us like to believe that we’re fairly empathetic, in the more casual sense of the word, at least. We all want to think that we can understand, even feel, emotions of others, especially when they are vulnerable or in need. And in our personal relationships most of us feel it vital to…
The last twelve months have hardly been like any other, for so many reasons. And it’s logical to focus on the big changes in our lives that are directly related to the pandemic. But we also are all dealing with the usual major life events, albeit under such strange circumstances. People are still graduating from…