How to Move from Bad Ideas to Breakthrough Ideas

Premise: I came across this reel on Instagram and loved the story and wanted to share it with you all. You can watch the reel here. While the story itself is better told by Dr. Caroline Brookfield in the reel, I wanted to share other things that I learnt watching and listening to the story and wanted to share that with you. So, here we go: Lesson 1: The importance of Psychological Safety The person who shared the idea about poking people’s eye was able to share the idea (which eventually led to the breakthrough idea) because that person felt […]

PBTO: The Art of Leading with Pankaj Rusia

https://traffic.libsyn.com/pushingbeyondtheobvious/PBTO_Pankaj_Rusia_.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Email | RSSPremise: In this first episode of a new series, which will be focused on leadership, we host a practicing leader – Pankaj Rusia. He currently works for SAP as the Head of Customer Success for the SAP HR Cloud business are and is based out of Singapore. As the Head of Customer Success for SAP South East Asia, he is on a mission to make customers look great in front of their leadership, employees, and managers, and to help them get the best out of their SuccessFactors solutions. Insights from the […]

Two ways to Drive Performance Improvements

A recent post on GapingVoid talks about another performance equation (I shared one yesterday on my blog here): Performance improvements = Reducing Errors + Increasing Insights – Gary Klein The author of the post argues that while there is a lot of focus on reducing errors in organisations, there is not enough focus or energy spent on increasing the number of insights that people could share and use to drive productivity improvements. I think there are many reasons for this behaviour. Firstly, we are biologically attuned to negative information more than anything else. So, it is obvious that we are […]

Unhurried Productivity with Digby Scott

One of the things that absolutely fascinates me is our obsession with productivity. And this obsession almost always leads us to feel guilty about not being busy all the time. I have written about being happily busy (another way to say unhurried productivity, but unhurried productivity sounds much better) here. Digby Scott has created a model that simplifies an important and complex idea is a very simple way. I highly recommend that you read the post by Digby on his blog here. You can read more about his experiment here and what he hopes to learn from it. He has […]

How to Help a Colleague Who Seems Off Their Game

When we think about productivity at work, we need to think beyond ourselves. As they say, as a team we are as strong or as productive as the weakest link on our team. This translates to the fact that if someone on our team is not doing their best work, we have a role to play in helping them back to being their productive best. This might not be an official part of our job but working with peers who are productive and doing good work has an impact on our work as well. Most of the times, it could […]