The Productive Pessimist

  British business spends a lot of time, energy, focus, and yes, money  "developing leaders".  Progression opportunities are secured by "demonstrating leadership skills." Constant calls are made that business, education, government, society at large, "needs more/stronger/better leaders." We need more women in leadership. No, actually, we need a different kind of masculinity  in leadership. Ah, actually, maybe we went too far, and it's time for "traditional masculinity" to be brought back to leadership. What about minority leaders? Maybe we should look at how neurodivergent folks and marginalised communities express leadership differently. The conversations, books, podcasts, and seminars around leadership are endless - and often contradictory.  We spend so many resources trying to give one definitive, always-true answer to the question "What makes a good leader?" The answer is simple: "What makes a good leader is competent, capa...

  "It's not pie! More for other people doesn't mean less for you!" This was the howl of social media's self-declared #neurodivergence, #disability communities in the late twenty-teens and into the twenty-twenties. It sounded almost convincing, a worthy rallying call that everyone who wanted to be On The Right Side of History should immediately get behind. And if you dared  to hesitate to get behind the statement, if you so much as thought  that it maybe didn't sound quite  right - well, you were privileged , you were guilty of ableism , you just wanted disabled people to not exist!  If you were  disabled yourself, and had some reservations about the pie-ness of inclusion, then you were "everything that's wrong with the world!" But - as so often happens - those who were hesitant have been proved right.  It turns out that, as many disabled people with observable, high-impact impairments, who need  workplace accommodations - and, most importantly, w...

  It's fair to say there's been quite a few crises doing the rounds recently. What many people may not consider when the next crisis hits the news, and the discourse centres the people impacted by  the crisis, are the people trying to lead through  the crisis, and bring it under control. Recent years have shown a rising trend of anti-leadership rhetoric, especially on social media, with the attitude being that no one actually needs  leadership, people are completely  capable of solving every problem they could ever encounter independently, business leaders don't actually do any work, but just take money from hard working people, and deliberately make life harder for people who are already struggling more than enough.  This attitude is driven by concepts such as the wisdom of crowds, which are increasingly being not so much debunked, but placed back in their original contexts - for example, that it is not that any crowd  will have greater 'wisdom' than ...

  The recent controversy around Meta's whole process of moving away from fact-checking has become, understandably, centred on Mark Zuckerberg's statement that "we need more masculine energy in tech." In the UK and USA, "masculine" and "feminine" are loaded words, and heavily shackled to "men" and "women" respectively; people tend to hear "masculine energy" and jump to "men"...and, from there, jump to "That's misogyny!" But masculine and feminine are simply types of energy  that people bring to a space; they do not have to  correlate to expressed genders of "man" and "woman". Masculine Energy Masculine energy is the energy of determined, often single-minded and individualistic, focus.  It's the energy of direct, concise communication. It's the energy that says "Tell me if you have a problem, and I'll stop it being  a problem for you."  It's the energy...

  Why bother with a mentor? Most of us have encountered the situation of knowing exactly what we want to do with our lives, or where we want to be in our careers, but not having a clue how to get there from where we are now.  The gulf between what we perceive as being "needed" in the role or life we want, and the resources, experience, and skills we have , seems un-bridge-able; there are no stepping stones, the current is too powerful, we don't know anyone with a boat... A mentor is, allegorically speaking, "a person with a boat." They've made the same journey we want to make, often from an equivalent, if not absolutely identical, starting point to us, and so they know  it's do-able for "someone like me" - because they are  "someone like you", and they did it. Unlike a coach, who supports you to become better at something you're already at the very least okay at, and who assumes the perspective of "I know more about this than...

  This is the main text of an article raising a critical eye at the UK government's recently announced social care reforms - which, themselves, are essential to ensure robust resilience, and an ability to actually implement, the planned reforms to the NHS. Our response here is intentionally brief, and intended to serve as an introduction and invitation to health and social care organisations, and other businesses, in the UK to partner with us to solve the problems they perceive with necessary systemic transformation. The cart before the horse Labour’s burning desire to reform the NHS, reduce waiting lists, and give patients greater autonomy and choice, relies on social care reforms; social care reforms which won’t even begin to be considered - by the groan-inducing “Commission” - until April 2025, with a very slow burn to a potential action plan being available sometime in 2028 - just in time for another General Election, and, very likely - given Labour’s proven ability to alienate...

  As leaders, we are often expected to have all the answers. If we don't, we risk dark mutterings about being "overpaid", about being "the reason people actually doing the work are struggling", or "the reason nothing ever gets done around here." Across sectors, people hate  leaders.  The NHS and UK social care, currently at the centre of political focus for reform, is littered with very public derision of "money being wasted on pointless leadership roles, rather than frontline services."  I've worked in a healthcare transformation leadership role, and...I'd be very wary of doing so again, purely because of  the attitudes from clinical staff, including their own operational leads. I was actually well-liked by these colleagues as a person, but even that regard couldn't get past the disdain my team, and what they represented, were held in. People don't like change, and they really  don't like change leaders. The reason why ch...