Is there a crisis in creative confidence in the workplace? We could be facing a crisis in creative confidence. With budgets slashed and resources cut, many people are being asked to do more with less – but few feel adequately equipped. The future will clearly require superior innovative thinking and problem solving skills, and yet so many feel paralyzed to act quickly and confidently when it comes to finding new ideas and solutions. Who is to blame for the apparent crisis in creative development? And how can leaders create and nurture an environment that supports creative thinking and development?

Did you know that: if a drunk walks down a road criss-crossing the middle line statisticians could say that on average he is walking in a straight line? the average person has less than 2 legs? (It only takes one person in the whole population to have 1 leg to take the average down.) Accor[...]

History has shown us that most people only behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. Be warned. As a new economic era begins, many people are looking back at what went wrong and trying to identify what led to the latest financial meltdown. But did we not see it coming? Althou[...]

There comes a time in the economic cycle where growth slows down and companies are forced again to take a good hard look at themselves. The joy of unprecedented growth can be short lived, and when ambitious hopes and dreams come crashing down it’s not always easy to cope. There is, literally and m[...]

Where the next 10 years will take us, and why innovation will no longer be a luxury. I'm writing to you from the year 2018. As cybertech companies have just opened their Pluto satellite, I am now able to send you this s-mail from the future. By using the gravitational pull from each of the planets, the s-mail has accelerated faster than the speed of light, passing through a space wormhole and backwards in time to you, in the hope you will not only see the future but change it by what you do today.

Innovation for the sake of innovation. There has been an ongoing battle between Microsoft, Apple, and Google – for quite some time now. Each is trying to win consumers over to their particular systems, and reports on the battle will often appear in the media as a hot topic.

A lesson in hope, luck and creativity for a great year ahead. By now most cultures have celebrated their official start to the New Year - often with ‘hope’ for good ‘luck’, which is a great start, but these may not be sufficient for the year ahead...

The first article in the three-part ’Situational Leadership’ series highlighted the need for direct connections to be made between what is taught and what is experienced in order to bridge the ‘synaptic gap’ between intention and implementation. This second article examines the need for recognizing personal styles for contemporary varied environments – and shows how leaders can lead in a way that is meaningful and relevant for them in their particular context.

Situational leadership for the long term. The first article in the three-part ’Situational Leadership’ series revealed how direct connections need to be made between what is taught and what is experienced in order to bridge the ‘synaptic gap’ between intention and implementation. The second article then examined the need for recognizing personal styles for contemporary varied environments – and showed how leaders can lead in a way that is meaningful and relevant for them in their particular context. This final article in the series focuses on situational leadership for the long term – how to ensure this sort of flexible leadership style can last.

Knowing the difference makes the difference. Last week someone who called himself an “electrician” came to our house. He turned up with very little in the way of tools, and he poked around the house as if he had never seen an electric wire before. Eventually, thorough trial and error, he was able to fix the immediate problem.

Future directions. The current worldwide political, social and economic reality has forced us all to stop and think seriously about future directions. Organizations, as well as individuals, are bracing themselves to face challenging times ahead.

About Inner hearing. Was Mozart’s ability to compose boosted because he could play the piano? The insider’s answer is no. The piano simply turned his inspirations into something others could hear. This link gave young Wolfgang Amadeus access to the opinions of others, to shape and guide his inspirations.

By Andrew Grant Knowing the difference makes the difference Last week someone who called himself an “electrician” came to our house. He turned up with very little in the way of tools, and he poked around the house as if he had never seen an electric wire before. Ev[...]

By Bruce Haddon We all know two thinking styles are better than one. The engineer and the designer combine well because each provides what the other lacks. Less well understood is the value of one person developing both their rational and their imaginative sides and alternating between t[...]

By Gaia Grant For the last few years many people have been expressing their desire that life could get back to normal. But what exactly is ‘normal’?! In the past 4000 years only 300 have been free of major wars. Perhaps we will have to come to terms w[...]

By Gaia Grant DIVE, SURVIVE OR THRIVE? Our world has changed dramatically, and we’re just going to have to come to terms with it. We have all known that life would never be quite the same after the September 11 tragedy, but this fact has [...]

By Gaia Grant To develop the creative innocence that leads to increased creativity you need to try the following... 1. Have a questioning mind A questioning mind arouses CURIOSITY, and curiosity can foster the desire to make new [...]

By Gaia Grant Imagine... If you could package creativity in a bottle... what would it look like? If you could hang it on a clothes line... what colour would it be, how would it sit? If creativity was a road... [...]

By Andrew Grant Individuals vs teams: how they stack up Have you ever noticed during elections much of the campaigning in many different countries around the world has focused on the charisma of individual leaders or the persona related to the family name rather than the effe[...]

Strategic management is far from complex, difficult or mysterious. What is a mystery is why so many Australian managers fail to do it.

By Gaia Grant Gaia and Andrew Grant, Directors of Tirian, provide a personal perspective on risk management from their home and office compound in Jimbaran, Bali. On Oct 1 at 7:50pm suicide bombers attacked a row of family restaurants on the beach barely [...]

Change Management Just Doesn’t Work By Robin Speculand - Bridges Consultancy International 10%. That is the percentage of strategies that are successfully implemented. Take a moment to reflect on what that means to businesses. The time and money spent by leaders hiring consultants, analyzi[...]

By Andrew Grant and Gaia Grant But how far can you go?? Assessing and managing risk Gaia and Andrew Grant, Directors of Tirian, provide a personal perspective on risk management whilst on holidays in the USA Rocky Mountains, USA With a 20+ hour plane trip from our ho[...]

By Andrew Grant THE REAL CHALLENGE … The latest topic for many conferences at the moment is e- commerce. Like with most changes in the workplace, the greatest challenge may not be the introduction of the system (hardware), but the need for people from the organization to embrace[...]

By Andrew Grant Is there a set model of a leader? (…especially a leader for a multinational company?) In working with a wide range of companies at all levels I have spent a great deal of time asking the same question and looking for a profile tha[...]

By Andrew Grant A Reflection on Sept 11 2001 Twin Towers Terrorist Attack by Andrew Grant No One Is An Island … “It has become a time of homecoming and housecleaning,  of  fathers calling their estranged so[...]

By Andrew Grant Over the past few years people from all walks of life in Asia have been forced to deal with crises and get on with life, no matter how tough. In the most recent of these crises, in the wake of the Tsunami tidal wave, we have all heard stories [...]

By Andrew Grant Where the head goes the body follows: My son was becoming too adventurous. He had progressed in his snowboarding from the kids’ snow park to the adult park. Making a jump now meant landing on a 45 degree sloping packed ice ramp after clearing a 5 meter air leap into the air[...]

Lessons from Inception Question: What did the following people all have in common?
- Manfred Eigen, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry (1967)
- Donald Campbell, Scientific Contribution Award from American Psychological Association (1970)
- Freeman Dyson, recipient of Max Planck Medal (1969), quantum electrodynamics
- Kekulé, 19th century chemist – molecular structure of benzene
- Archimedes – weight in water theory.
- Cobb- Inception

How to use both creative thinking and analytical skills to achieve better results (+ give your children an intelligent Christmas!)

You might like to try playing a game with your children next birthday or Christmas – a game where they have to use their brain to receive a present from you! In this game, there are 3 beautifully wrapped boxes under the tree, 2 boxes containing a picture of a goat and one containing a very expensive present from you. You ask your children to choose which box they think has the most expensive present (they are not allowed to shake or feel the boxes). They can point to any of the three to make their choice. Then, before they make their final commitment, you say you are going to make it easier for them. You open one of the boxes which you know does not contain the expensive gift and show them that box only has a picture of a goat, and remove it from under the tree. Now comes the part where they have to think. Ask them whether they want to stick with the original box they chose, or whether they would rather switch to the other remaining box. Tell them that they only get to keep what’s in the box – whether it is the present or the picture of a goat!

A series of unfortunate events, the customer experience and the organisational impact.

Things go wrong, there is often no getting around it. And for organisations responsible for serving customers, when things go wrong it can have a major impact on the customer experience and in turn the overall perceptions of the organisation. Yet while some organisations quickly recover and even prosper when things go wrong, others suffer enormously. Statistics show that the customer experience overall is actually declining over time. A quarterly survey of 65,000 Americans which looked at The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) has found that in the past five years the index has dropped. For some reason, the more an emphasis is placed on improving the customer experience, the less it seems to work.

The final sentence, and that wretched comma We have just finished the process of assisting an executive team from a Fortune 500 insurance company with designing and implementing a new 5 year vision that will be rolled out country wide. It was a rewarding experience with great outcomes. As we got close to the end of the session, however, the team became stuck in an in depth deliberation over a minute detail. “Do we put a comma in or not?” This discussion went backwards and forwards until I noticed the body language of some members who became increasingly impatient. Many were wondering, “Is it really necessary to debate about a comma?!”

Being correct is no longer good enough - why being creative is what counts By Gaia Grant and Andrew Grant On the last day of her final high school exams, our 17 year old daughter crossed the school quad feeling absolutely shattered. Despite having put her best efforts into studying, she felt sh[...]

Why school is out of date for future workforce demands By Gaia Grant and Andrew Grant If you read some of the most popular books on creative thinking, you might conclude that you need to fail at school in order to succeed in life. Many of these books describe the admired contemporary creative [...]