Skip to main content

Insights

Blog

Discover and debate opinions about what really matters in organisations.

Purple sunflower
Change
Leadership
Teams

Collective experience: An opportunity for hybrid organisations

Hybrid work is here to stay. But hybrid does present challenges. Large group, leadership workshops for events can catalyse performance and help drive business results.

Read the article

Change
Digital & Technology
Leadership
News

The greatest organisational challenges of 2024

Our global series of events brought 183 leaders together in New York, London, Singapore and Zurich. They named their biggest organisational challenge and discussed how to shape tomorrow's workplace in...

Read the article

Change
Digital & Technology

5 questions for digital transformation triumph

There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for a successful digital transformation. Every company is unique, with its own way of doing things, its own history and its own capabilities. It’s knowing what...

Read the article

Change

The unwritten rules of organisational change

I was speaking at a digital transformation conference last year in Portugal. During my bus journey to the conference venue on one of the mornings, I met someone who was diligently typing away on his...

Read the article

Leadership

Leaders should tell more stories

Why is storytelling important? “A story is like the water you heat for your bath. It takes messages between the fire and your skin. It lets them meet. And it cleans you.” – Rumi Stories reach the...

Read the article

Leadership
Management Development

Training on how NOT to exceed expectations

My grades varied at school, but I always received an ‘A’ for effort. When I started work, “incentive” schemes ran from the premise that merely ‘achieving’ targets would leave you with a poor score...

Read the article

Adventure

A change to warmer waters

We continue to follow the adventures of Ross and Chris Greenwood who are sailing the Pacific Ocean for three years, carrying out environmental, educational and conservation work. We spent the summer...

Read the article

Wellbeing & Personal Development

Taming workplace fear

Man’s earliest ancestors lived in treacherous times. Tribes and clans were formed as a means of protection against a menacing environment. Over the ages, our vigilance for social safety continues. The...

Read the article

Change

Change in the face of complex business challenges

What do you do when faced with a problem so vast so complex and so confusing that you can’t really work out what’s going on and have little idea what to do or where to start? The short easy answer is...

Read the article

Teams

Good Moaning

There are a couple of people in our company who you can always rely on to highlight the elephant in the room, highlight the other side of apparently good news and generally call out the areas of our...

Read the article

Leadership

Leadership: Can we still avoid the scary option of authenticity? Part II

Read part I. No more heroes... Looking at leadership, there are various perspectives from which we can consider this fascinating topic. We could imagine somebody who can save us and go in search of...

Read the article

Leadership

Leadership: Can we still avoid the scary option of authenticity?

Which way to turn? We happen to live in a world that is showing us increasingly striking situations, which seem to overcome the limit of what we believed was acceptable: economic crisis, terrorist...

Read the article

Leadership
Talent

Monster stress: to battle or befriend?

What holds women back as leaders? How can women leaders be heard? We discuss the part culture plays and women's responses to aiding themselves and others.

Read the article

Sustainable Innovation

System smitten?

Jo Appleby, In Conversation with…Karen Jaques and Garrett Weiner, Senior Consultants at Impact, on ‘Systems thinking’. There seems to be no end to the use of the word ‘system’ in our global societies...

Read the article

Wellbeing & Personal Development

Our attention gets no respect!

Attention series part 2. Read part 1 here. As leaders, we demonstrate little regard for our own attention. I’m as guilty as anyone. We allow our focus to be pillaged, stolen by unproductive meetings...

Read the article

Change
Wellbeing & Personal Development

If I let go of who I am I become who I might be

"If I let go of who I am I become who I might be" - Lao Tzu. What does this quote mean to you? What does it mean that could help your development? I think it means, in its very simplistic form, that...

Read the article

Wellbeing & Personal Development

Seeking or settling?

The Shadow of Self Improvement Fritz Perls, one of the founders of gestalt psychology once said something like “ Those that live their lives totally focussed on the future never catch up with the...

Read the article

Leadership

Bold leadership - a guilty secret

Impact’s mission is to help people develop their leadership capacity by understanding leadership not as a role, title or set of qualities, but as a special type of action , taken in service of...

Read the article

Digital & Technology

Is the Internet making us stupid?

Digital learning platforms vs digital learning processes Digital technology hasn’t changed how human beings learn. It has fundamentally changed the range of tools we can use to assist our learning...

Read the article

Sustainable Innovation

A heartfelt response to a fractured world

On January 20th, 2017, the World Economic Forum gathered together in a call for Responsive and Responsible Leadership. One year later and what’s changed? Klaus Schwab introduced four primary...

Read the article

Change

Are you prepared for the workplace of the future?

The future of the workplace will, to a certain extent, be shaped by the trends of today but there’s also an element of uncertainty for organisations and their people that can only be managed by strong...

Read the article

Digital & Technology

The Earth is Flat — a quick guide to digital learning philosophy

Complex problems demand more of our implicit or tacit knowledge, given that explicit knowledge is now ubiquitous and instantly available. It is not what we know as much as how we apply what we know...

Read the article

Digital & Technology

Is the distinction between learning and work being eroded by tech?

Historically organisations were regarded as mechanistic; they functioned as machines, controlled through hierarchies with success measured narrowly - usually only in numbers (output, financial returns...

Read the article

Change

The number one way to win buy-in through hearts and minds

This interview originally appeared in GreenBiz blog. As a changemaker, you constantly face challenges to gain buy-in, engage others on the journey and measure impact. In the new Purpose and People...

Read the article

Sustainable Innovation

Why doughnuts are good for us

As we face increasing levels of uncertainty and change, one of the key skills we all need is to challenge our own mental models about how the world works. I’m not suggesting we resort to eating...

Read the article

Change
Innovation & Creativity

Leading across the threshold

Increasingly, today’s world requires our businesses to become ever more emergent, innovative and adaptive. In turn, our leadership becomes more about empowering, empathising and encouraging...

Read the article

Wellbeing & Personal Development

Start again

Not being the most technically competent person, I have this profound respect for the reset button. So you can imagine the delight when, on a meditation retreat, I finally figured out, we have an...

Read the article

Adventure

The adventure path

John Matthews explores how a sense of adventure is fundamental to our happiness It’s a common question to be asked: So when are you happiest?... For me I am often at my happiest when heading out into...

Read the article

Management Development
Wellbeing & Personal Development

Attention is our most valuable asset

In today’s complex and demanding workplace, an organisation’s most valuable asset is no longer people’s time, it’s their attention. Attention is defined as what we each choose to focus on and what we...

Read the article

Change

Tools versus practices - lessons from DIY

I recently organised my DIY tools at home. For far too long they had been stuffed in a cupboard under the stairs which not only made it really difficult to find anything but hurt my back every time I...

Read the article

Wellbeing & Personal Development

Can we talk about love here?

Should we talk about love at work? Is it part of developing workplace spirituality and sustainability?

Read the article

Change

What are the masks you wear?

With Carnivale season upon us, one can be forgiven in thinking about masks and the masks we wear. Carl Jung (1928) wrote about the personas or masks we adopt and present to the world as a way to make...

Read the article

Wellbeing & Personal Development

Everyone ready

I was asked recently to write a new year’s article. Something about, good wishes and our hope for 2018. This is what I wrote instead … Ten, Nine, I started writing an article about countdowns. About...

Read the article

Adventure
Change

Make Stress Positive for You

I went swimming in Llyn Padarn with my pregnant friend Sarah. Being eight months pregnant it can cause curvature and puts pressure on your spine known as lordosis. Therefore, spending some time...

Read the article

Change
Wellbeing & Personal Development

A Year of Resolutions

Like the slogan “a puppy is not just for Christmas”, I feel resolutions aren’t just for the New Year . From those resolutions we purposefully set, to those that spontaneously emerge, each helps...

Read the article

Adventure
Change

More change than one would like

We left the south of New Zealand behind and headed for Akaroa on the Banks Peninsula near Christchurch New Zealand. A quiet, well kept, coastal resort with a microclimate that favours palm trees and...

Read the article

Wellbeing & Personal Development

One major belief that holds you back

Human beings have a natural need to avoid and/or resolve discomfort of any kind. Humans also have a need to see themselves develop and experience pleasure also. This is evident in the amazing...

Read the article

Change

The Future of Business

Embracing the logic of life We are living in turbulent and troubled times. These times of breakdown and breakthrough invoke fear and the desire to hunker-down, stick to the tried-and-tested, tweak the...

Read the article