I was mending fences at the weekend; quite literally. In the UK, we had some heavy winds over the holiday and new year period, which finally put an end to fencing that was on borrowed time. Events can do this to relationships too. And while I was doing it, it struck me that the expression, […]

  There is a classic psychology test, known as Duncker’s candle problem, in which subjects are given a candle, a box of matches and some drawing pins (thumb tacks). The task is to fix a lit candle onto a cork-board on the wall so the candle won’t drip wax onto the table below. The test […]

If you are keen to maintain top performance at work, one small step can make a surprisingly big difference. Do you get up and walk to the water cooler when you are thirsty? Most people do, and if you are one of them, then you are leaving it too late. The problem is that we […]

When you score a success in anything, it can be hard to resist a little sense of pride in your effectiveness and productivity. Indeed, in terms of motivation, this pride is a good thing: becoming more conscious of what you achieve can boost your self-confidence, possibly leading to better performance and thus more success. But […]

We all know that ‘after-lunch’ feeling, when our bodies slow down, our brains go mushy and we’d rather just take a nap. Some call it ‘food coma’, ‘siesta time’ or, in the medical trade, ‘postprandial somnolence’. Whatever you call it, it drains your productivity, so how can you avoid it? I have deliberately constructed the […]

  Do you find you get up and get to work with a little more enthusiasm on a Monday morning than on any other day? I know I do. Do you find you are raring to go on your first day back after a vacation – or even a public holiday. If you think this […]

The human brain has a number of different modes of thinking, which I characterize as Click, Bubble, Hum, Squeak and Sigh. These are just a helpful model of complex set of brain functions that, we continue to discover, are deeply interconnected. Take, for example, an experiment carried out by researchers at the University of Amsterdam, […]

In a simple experiment conducted at Michigan State University, students were set a repetitive task and their brain responses were monitored whenever they made a mistake (about 9 per cent of the time). After the test, the students were also asked if they thought that intelligence is fixed or is learned. It turned out that […]

Often, as managers, we focus on what it takes to get under-performance in check. But for many of us, the days of under-performance among our teams are behind us, happily. The problem is that we get set in our ways: the things we did worked, so we continue to do them. There are a slew […]

People like me, who train speakers and write books like ‘How to Speak so People Listen’ are fond of the advice to use metaphors to spice up your language and make people more receptive to your message. And I stand by that advice. But I recently came upon some experimental data that ups the stakes […]