On day in my teens I was doing some work with my Dad. In the morning, he was pouring his cup of coffee, and knocked the canister over. I don’t remember if it was the cup, or the filter/holder that tipped over… In any event, he ended up with proper burns all over his arm,...

When I was studying at university, the goal was to max out on the test. To be “positioned” as high as possible at the end of the fourth year, so that you could get into the interviews you wanted. While of course this was a small circle – a “bubble” in the culture – it...

The Gartner Hype cycle teaches us about the adoption curve of new technology. We see the early adopters buy in, prices are high, mass media grabs on, there’s a pop, and then inevitably the slide into the trough of disillusionment. The “hype” part is that “little extra” at the front end. Hype is the mass...

When I was 14, my Dad and I were on the boat solo. We were sailing from Isle of Pines in New Caledonia, back to the mainland there, before we were to kick off a circumnavigation around the country. We were about half-way, and we knew there was a shallow reef at some point. The...

On a good day, perhaps I consider myself: Generous, helpful, a leader, creative, innovative, hard working, thoughtful, compassionate… On a bad day, maybe I think: I’m lazy, I’m scared, I’m hiding, I’m not good enough, I’m distracted… Of course, the lists could go on. The question is: yesterday, today, tomorrow, what is more likely? We...

There was an experiment where two groups of people performed mental tasks while some really distracting noise was running… The participants in one of the groups had a switch to turn off the noise. In the other group, there was no switch. It turns out that even though most of the participants in the first...

What do you choose to do? What do you choose to not do? How did those two groups become established? When did you draw the lines in between them? What would happen if you re-considered these lines? With a shift in our work-life landscape, we’ve got a choice. We can look at things as though...

Over-extension and then mean reversion is a pretty natural tendency. We see it with fish in a school, birds in a flock, stocks in a market and humans in a culture. A lot of times (like now), a reversion back to something a little more culturally “normal” feels right. A little bit of what we...