Latest posts

  • How To Diagnose Culture Before You Spend On The Wrong Fix

    How To Diagnose Culture Before You Spend On The Wrong Fix

    You run a quarterly engagement survey. It says people do not feel heard. You and your boss sit down to make sense of it and the whiteboard fills up fast: no culture of listening, not enough channels to speak up, managers who need to listen better, a loop you never closed from last time, leadership…

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  • You Cannot Workshop Your Way Into Culture Change

    You Cannot Workshop Your Way Into Culture Change

    What Ford’s turnaround really reveals about crisis, assumptions, and the limits of culture programs In 2006, Ford was close to collapse. It was about to report a loss of $12.7 billion, the worst single year in its history, and over the next three years it would lose more than $30 billion. The company had become…

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  • Five Reasons Your Team Can’t Set SMART Goals (And None Of Them Are About The Acronym)

    Five Reasons Your Team Can’t Set SMART Goals (And None Of Them Are About The Acronym)

    It’s been 45 years since George T. Doran gave us the SMART framework. So why are we still struggling with the basics? Last month, a practice leader – someone responsible for a team of fifty – reached out to me with a familiar request. “We need an L&D intervention on SMART goals,” she said. “I’ve…

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  • Your Competency Framework Was Designed To Fail

    Your Competency Framework Was Designed To Fail

    Why most competency frameworks collapse – and why the fix isn’t what you think In twelve years of building competency frameworks across consulting, the public sector, and corporate environments, I have rarely seen one sustain cross-functional use. Frameworks get approved, socialised, and documented – but they do not get used. They exist as artefacts, not…

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  • Writing a Succession Planning Policy in the Real World(Not the Textbook Version)

    Writing a Succession Planning Policy in the Real World(Not the Textbook Version)

    ORGANIZATIONS 11 March, 2026 5 min read Over the past few weeks, I found myself working deeply on a problem that sits at the intersection of strategy, governance, and human capital: how does a large organization systematically build a leadership pipeline that can withstand uncertainty? I was whiteboarding a succession planning and leadership development policy…

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  • What The Good Wife Teaches Us About Relational Intelligence

    What The Good Wife Teaches Us About Relational Intelligence

    ORGANIZATIONS 08 Jan, 2026 3 min read And what it doesn’t (spoilers ahead) My husband introduced me to The Good Wife a few months ago and we catch an episode every day or two. We are about to finish Season 6 (Alicia just withdrew her nomination from the State’s Attorney’s race), and I’ve grown to…

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