Blog

 How did you get here: did you improvise? It’s fun to ask people at meetings how they got there. They usually answer with details of a walk, a car drive or an adventure with public transport. Someone occasionally asks how far back I want them to begin. “I was born in...

Why it is wise to improvise When you ask people to define wisdom, they tell you it’s about ‘Exercising judgement when it’s not possible to be certain’. And that is also a pretty good definition of improvisation. Wisdom takes care of the gap between what we notice and...

 How Oxford proposes flexibility from the top Professor Louise Richardson has spoken of her vision for Oxford's future as she becomes Vice-Chancellor of the University. She aims to keep Oxford in the forefront of international education with 'ever more creativity,...

So you want to feel certain feelings? Well, you need fast and reliable feedback from your experiences, to know whether or not you are getting the feelings you want.

So how do you build a successful new organisation?  Here are the tips I gleaned from a recent ODIN network session in London, led by Ann-Marie Lister, head of Organisation Development at the new Atom Bank.

I enjoyed a recent meeting with Gary Peters, author of The Philosophy of Improvisation, when I discovered that he describes himself as an ‘ironist’.

What’s the difference between a performance that is improvised and one that is not? It’s the script, obviously. Yet actors quite rightly object to us supposing that their performances are fixed. Part of their art is to make any performance appear spontaneous. And, of course, if it is live, then it is ‘in the moment’ and in some sense unpredictable.

It was a routine training conference. Between sessions, there was a nice moment when a guy in shorts and long hair played some jazz on the piano at the side of the stage.

Happiness, says author Paul Dolan, is a mix of purpose and pleasure.  During a lecture at London’s Conway Hall, he argued that one of the problems with studies of happiness is that people tend to offer evaluations of how happy they think they were over a period of time, rather than direct in-the-moment ratings of their experience.

The human brain has evolved to make life easy for us.  We do most of what we do effortlessly.  Yes, we suffer sometimes from unfortunate biases and some of our heuristics don’t always work for us.  But these are exceptions to the brain’s brilliance.