Creativity is the ability to see connections where others see separation. It is the most powerful tool leaders have to unlock ideas that would never emerge from another ordinary meeting.
Curiosity in meetings gets recommended constantly and almost never sticks. There is a reason for that, and it has very little to do with whether your people know how to ask a good question. Start with the scene, because you…
Good idea or bad idea? Somebody on your team comes to you with one. An improvement, a new product, a new service. An idea. Knowing how to deal with a bad idea, or with one that only looks bad at…
Creative questions are the most under-taught skill in professional life. Coding gets proposed as a fourth literacy alongside reading, writing and arithmetic, which is an odd argument to be having in the age of no-code tools. Something else deserves teaching…
The levels of creativity concern everybody, including the people convinced they are not creative. If that sounds like you, you are almost certainly underestimating yourself, because we are all intrinsically creative and every one of us can become more so.…
Professional curiosity at work is the drive to search, explore and put yourself into situations that carry the potential to teach you something. Over a career it does three things: it builds knowledge, it develops intellectual and creative capacity, and…
T-shaped skills describe a person who goes deep in one discipline and stays broad across several others. The metaphor is close to forty years old, it has survived every management fashion since, and it still gets treated as a personal…
To introduce the idea of the hands-on HR director, I have to take you with me to Sydney in 2009. A candidate is being interviewed by the HR manager of a Sydney-based bank. After the presentation of the company, the…
Curiosity in recruitment is having its gold rush. Books arrive in quantity, neuroscience research keeps finding that curiosity improves memory and learning, and the word has started appearing in job advertisements everywhere. You will recognise the phrasing. A marketing role…