The Definitive Community Love Evaluation Framework
Today is Valentines Day and love is in the air. But how much love, exactly? To figure this out, I created a simple tool that helps me evaluate how much I love different parts of my life. I call it the Definitive Community Love Evaluation (Copilot tried to call it "The...
Three Creativity Lessons from Kindergarten
I’m learning a lot about kindergarten. A novel part of COVID worklife for my wife (who is her own woman) and I is that we get to teach our oldest son kindergarten. Feeling swells of exhaustion, inspiration and humility each week is becoming commonplace as we stand in...
Empathy is Harder than Math
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. It involves perceiving and connecting with their emotions, fostering understanding, and often responding with compassion and support. Mathematics is the language of patterns and relationships in...
Three Ways that Circles Empower and Connect Communities
Elevating inclusion, belonging, and democracy in peoples’ worklife requires a delicate balance of autonomy and connection. Sociocracy is a type of organizational collaboration that cultivates psychological safety and inclusive decision making with the intention of...
10 Things we Need to Make Work From Anywhere Happen
This Wall Street Journal article was bouncing around the Internet earlier this week. CEOs and Executive Directors from Vancouver to Nairobi to Singapore are evaluating the impact of Covid-19 on work, particularly the emerging reality of our “work from anywhere”...
Governance
The world is less democratic than it was 15 years ago. Peoples' growing malaise with democracy has been a disturbing trend that dates back to the 1970s. The way we govern our communities - neighbourhood associations, corporate boards, regional elections - reflects how...
Six Professional Lessons From Six Movie Side Hustles
We tend to remember Indiana Jones as a Nazi-fighting, world-saving, rough-and-tumble adventurer, not as a Professor of Archeology. We tend to remember Erin Brockovich as a feisty, community-minded legal aid who held corporations accountable, not as a single mom. And...
What Comes After Burnout?
Burnout is a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity. Due to factors such as recognition (or lack thereof), workload, and safety, nearly one third of Canadians are feeling burned out...
Finding a Job is Just Like Dating
Around the world, career practitioners continually search for meaningful, engaging and inspiring metaphors that will, among other things, drive clients their way. Powerful metaphors also help people better understand their work search, too. (Friend and colleague)...
Sociocracy
Sociocracy is a system of governance and constant decision making that unlocks the potential of highly democratic, often member-led communities. It seeks to create psychologically safe environments and organizations through human-centric approaches and radical...
Career Development is the Vaccine for The Great Reshuffle
There is a vaccine to address recruitment and retention in the wake of “The Great Reshuffle.” It’s called career development. A national survey recently conducted by Environics for CERIC — a Canadian charitable organization that advances education and research in...
How to Bounce Back from a Bad Day
We all have bad days at work. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we have to fire people. And sometimes (hopefully not too often) we get fired or downsized from a job that we love and/or need. To overcome such hardships professionals like you must be resilient in how you...
From Isomorphism to Youniqueness
The right thing for your craft, your community, and your soul is to move from isomorphism to youniqueness. Year by year humanity embraces monoculture like agribusiness plants monocrops. Consequently, we have a lot of corn, and we have a lot of Marvel content. When we...