On emotional contagion, the culture nobody writes about and what riders and elephants have to do with it. Jonathan Haidt described the mind as a rider sitting on an elephant. The rider is our rational, planning self and the elephant everything emotional and instinctive. It’s the elephant that is stronger. Chip and Dan Heath later borrowed the image in Switch to explain why so much change struggles. You can give the rider a perfectly good map but if the elephant isn’t persuade

On teamwork, trust and why the Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team produces some of the most significant change we see in our work.. Hands up who hasn’t been part of, or worked with, a team that would describe themselves as reasonably functional. What we mean by this is that there are regular meetings, where decisions are made and actions get done. Generally, there is a positive energy to the team. Most people get on with each other although if you talk to people privately, th

There are moments in organisational life that reveal something true – about leadership, about people, about what actually matters when the pressure is on. The pandemic was one of them. Between 2020 and 2021, we ran a series of workshops and research sessions with leaders from across sectors and geographies – trying to make sense, in real time, of what was working and what wasn't. The three papers below capture what we found. They were written in the moment and they read that

Three words. Nine letters. And until fairly recently, a question nobody actually expected an answer to. Think about how many times a day you say it. In the corridor, at the start of a call, as someone passes your desk. How are you? Fine, thanks. Fine, thanks. Fine, thanks. A ritual exchange, a social reflex – not really a question at all. And then something changed. For many of us, it changed during the pandemic, when suddenly the question meant something different. Managers