Last week I had the privilege to join the leading lights from the field of play, learning, child development and creativity gathering in the sleepy town of Billund, home of the LEGO Group and the LEGO Foundation, and dedicating three days to re-defining play and re-imagining learning. The Conference this year sought to make a break with…
Author: Cecilia
Finding what drives you
Recently I sat down with a friend who was very excited. She had applied to the MIT Media Lab and couldn’t wait to hear back if she had been accepted. An accomplished professional, she already had a masters degree under her belt, and could namedrop more famous institutions she had studied at than most of…
How to be more resilient
In a previous post I wrote about how resilience is far more powerful a predictor of success than age, gender, nationality, educational background – well, pretty much anything. The post talked about what resilience entails and what behaviours are part of resilience. Crucially, none of these are things you are born with, but habits that…
What Makes a Good Leader?
Check out this excellent by Megan Richter at the Thin Difference blog: What Makes a Good Leader?.
The greater the resilience, the greater the chance of success
Over the past year I have learned a lot about leadership in the context of creating transformational change. On the surface of it, we are in the process of building a new LEGO.com and redoing the foundations for how the site works and connects to every part of our business. The first part of the…
The more diversity, the faster the perceived change
What might be behind the apparent differences in how we perceive the pace of change? It struck me that despite sharing the same experiences, working in the same company, living in the same part of the world, city or neighborhood, perceptions can vary greatly. What is interesting is how we may be looking at exactly…
Thriving in fluid environments
Recently I found myself on a call with three great minds, talking about the frustrations around nations, organisations and individuals clinging to assert control in a world, largely fluid and ever changing. Our desire for control, predictability, reducing uncertainty is out of step with the reality around us. In fact, the only thing which is…
Are you biases holding you back?
As we grow older, learn more and generally gain more experience – we’d like to think we get smarter, but what if we are wrong? What if the more we know about something, the more vested we become in preserving what we know as the ‘truth’ and the more affected by biases we become? I…
Change in organisations is similar to bi-polar disorder in individuals
This was the shocking insight I discovered recently when reading a research paper published by Bain & Company. According to the authors, the emotional turmoil associated with large scale change inside organisations is a series of moodswings between the extremes of euphoria and depression, created by our collective fear of the unknown, loss aversion,…
Become known for creating something, not criticising it
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly;…
“Don’t Aim at success -…
“Don’t Aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. for success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue.. as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.”
Victor Frankl, FromMan’s Search for Meaning.
Can conflict add value?
A discussion I had at a recent company seminar, captured the complicated relationship many of us have with conflict. One of my colleagues spoke of a challenging position in the middle of opposing stakeholders, some of whom seemed to take delight in conflict for conflict’s sake. My colleague confessed that he often waited (in his…
