Purpose and Direction

Vor 6 Tagen•14:52

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 working out where to start. One job and one conversation for the first. For the second, whichever symptom in your team is currently the loudest. Try them, then tell me what changes.

What on Earth is Purpose?

28.07.2026•25:10

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 purpose and direction are one connected leadership practice, and why no framework can do that work for you. I also look at what this means for AI adoption, and why it becomes a stress test for what an organisation already believes about the value of human work. On Thursday, the reflection episode follows with practices to build the connection between purpose and direction in your own team.

Listen to Understand

16.07.2026•14:10

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 away with you, and four moves for asking better questions.

The Talking Reflex

14.07.2026•19:33

Most managers are sure they listen well while their people don't feel heard. This episode is about that gap, why it survives, and what 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 the quality of your listening.

Would They Tell You?

09.07.2026•14:21

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 critical thinking. Underneath both sits the responsibility to make sure that the reality of work reaches the people who decide about it.

Psychological Safety

07.07.2026•27:33

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 research reveals something uncomfortable about every AI adoption dashboard: High usage numbers can mean the opposite of what they look like. If you are leading inside an organisation making AI decisions right now, this episode shows you the risk of doing it without psychological safety. The reflection episode on Thursday gives you key practices to establish it.