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Highly conservative

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Godfried Donkor ® c/o 1957 Gallery (London)

The way business bets are structured, as you push responsibility and accountability further down the organisation, people become more risk-averse and more uncertainty-averse. You become more worried about downside avoidance than upside opportunity. As a result, both innovation and marketing are fat-tailed activities, where 10% of what you do is probably more valuable than everything else combined. And you can’t tell in advance which 10% it’s going to be, they are processes of exploration and discovery.

What organisations do, in pursuit of efficiency, is eliminate that discovery layer. In the short term, it looks like a great idea. In the long term, I think it proves fatal, because you lose the ability to adapt, reinvent and reposition in pursuit of the occasional breakthrough. What do you think?

Pay attention to ...

If you focus sharply on one target audience, you’ll often find, as a byproduct of that focus, that incremental audiences discover you too. For example, take a meal-kit service built for busy young professionals who want something quick after work. The company markets to that audience, builds for that audience, and then discovers along the way that retirees are signing up too, drawn by the same thing from a different angle: simple, pre-portioned meals that take the guesswork out of cooking for one or two people.

Marketing is usually eager to show a product or service in the hands of young people. I think new audiences are appearing all the time who simply have not learned yet what people born ten years earlier already know. That’s the opportunity: you don’t need to invent something new to be innovative. Sometimes it’s enough to teach a new audience something the last one already figured out. What do you think?

A sense of fulfilment

Happiness and achievement are independent variables.We treat them as if they move on the same line, as if enough achievement eventually converts into happiness, like currency you can exchange once you hit a certain amount. Remember they are not measuring the same thing, achievement measures distance traveled against a goal whilst happiness measures the quality of your relationship with the present moment, regardless of where you are on that journey. This is why you can hit the milestone and feel nothing. And why you can be in the middle of something unfinished, uncertain, maybe even failing, and still feel genuinely alive.

““Human diversity is a feature, not a bug. In any group of around 150 people, shaped by our evolutionary history, there will always be people who think differently.”
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— Helen Taylor

From strategy to action

There is an interesting paradox in business: we often protect our “secrets” because we assume that if we share what we know, others will simply copy us. Yet, in practice, people rarely replicate a successful approach as easily as we imagine. You can give someone the evidence. You can explain what you do, how you do it and why it works. They can have access to the same information and still struggle to reproduce the results. Part of the reason is cultural. What works in one organisation may depend on behaviours, values, relationships, leadership practices and ways of thinking that cannot simply be copied from a document or presentation. Perhaps the real competitive advantage is not always the information itself. It is the organisational capability to turn that information into consistent action.

Your greatest resource

Happiness and achievement are independent variables. We treat them as if they move on the same line, as if enough achievement eventually converts into happiness, like currency you can exchange once you hit a certain amount. But they are not measuring the same thing as achievement measures distance traveled against a goal, and happiness measures the quality of your relationship with the present moment, regardless of where you are on that journey. This is why you can hit the milestone and feel nothing. And why you can be in the middle of something unfinished, uncertain, maybe even failing, and still feel genuinely alive.

There is a danger is not pursuing achievement and the danger is outsourcing your happiness to it, deciding in advance that joy is conditional on arrival. That bargain rarely pays out the way we expect, because the goalposts move the moment we reach them. The promotion becomes the next promotion. The number becomes a bigger number. I think we should be happy to be happy, achieve to achieve. Let each one stand on its own terms instead of asking one to justify the other. The person who can do this isn't settling for less, they are refusing to make their peace of mind conditional on outcomes they can't fully control.

Every so often

I know many people who are influenced by recency bias which makes allowing the most recent experience, conversation or narrative to shape their perception while losing sight of the bigger picture. When you notice tension in your body, pause. Release it. Ground yourself. Become present. Then choose how you want to show up. This does not mean ignoring or suppressing what you feel. It means recognising that you can influence your emotional state rather than being completely driven by it. Before people hear our words, they often experience our emotional state. Our tone, presence, body language and energy communicate something before we have said very much at all. And sometimes, how we make people feel can have a greater impact than the words we choose.

Homo sapiens

We are all mammals, and our brains carry an evolutionary history that can sometimes make unfamiliar people or situations feel more threatening or uncertain than they actually are. Our brains evolved to help us detect potential danger, navigate social relationships and respond quickly to our environment. Although the human brain has continued to evolve, many of the systems involved in emotion, threat detection and social behaviour have much deeper evolutionary roots than modern societies do. And this matters when we think about difference.

One of the most consequential ideas developed in European intellectual history was the classification of human beings into racial categories. Race was constructed as a way of categorising people, often based on perceived physical differences, and these categories were subsequently used to create hierarchies and justify systems of power and exclusion. The consequences have been profound, including the distortion and marginalisation of African histories and the creation of assumptions about human difference that have persisted across societies. Scientifically, however, we are one species: Homo sapiens. Our species evolved in Africa, with the oldest currently recognised Homo sapiens fossils dating to around 300,000 years ago. All living human beings share this common evolutionary history, and our genomes are more than 99.9% alike.

There is enormous human variation, including differences in skin colour, physical characteristics and genetic ancestry. Yet those differences exist within a single human species, and most genetic variation occurs within populations rather than neatly between socially defined racial groups. Perhaps the more useful question, therefore, is not why humans are different. It is why we have historically attached so much social meaning, hierarchy and value to those differences.

It takes one to know one

Actions give beliefs somewhere to live, and maybe the same is true of kindness. Some of the kindest people I have encountered have experienced extraordinary unkindness themselves. They know what it feels like to be dismissed, excluded, judged or made to feel small. Perhaps that is why they choose differently, as they remember how those experiences felt and consciously choose not to pass that pain on to someone else. Their kindness is not weakness; it is a decision to break the cycle. We are not defined solely by what has happened to us. We are also defined by what we choose to do with what has happened to us.

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Second guessing

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Think about the cognitive load involved in constantly monitoring your body language, your tone of voice, your cultural references and your humour. Running a constant background calculation:
“Is this safe to say?”
“Will this make me stand out?”
“Will this mark me as ‘other’?”

That constant monitoring takes both mental and emotional energy. Energy that could otherwise be used to contribute, collaborate, solve problems, build relationships, be creative or simply do your job. Instead, it is spent managing how you are perceived. You are no longer simply participating in the environment, you are performing belonging. Contact me via this link for a complimentary discovery session.

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Social acceptance

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Code switching is a linguistic and behavioural strategy used to adapt to different environments. It can mean shifting from casual language and slang with your friends to a more formal tone at work. It can involve changing your posture, voice modulation, the references you make, the humour you use, or even the way you laugh. We all adapt how we communicate depending on the context and the people around us. To some degree, that is simply contextual intelligence. Knowing how to read a room and adapt your communication can be an important social skill.

However, code switching can take on another dimension when someone feels they need to change aspects of themselves to fit in, gain acceptance or avoid negative stereotypes. The distinction matters, and adapting to your environment is not inherently bad as in many situations, it is smart and necessary. The question is what happens when adaptation becomes a requirement for belonging. If you constantly feel that you have to modify your language, behaviour, appearance or personality to be accepted, you may start asking yourself: Who am I allowed to be in this space? And that brings us back to inclusion because a truly inclusive environment should allow people to adapt to the context without feeling that they have to erase parts of themselves to belong.

The human touch

In a world that is rapidly changing, leadership is no longer only about authority. It is about empathy, emotional intelligence and mastering the art of guiding others. The journey from individual contributor to people leader can be challenging. As suddenly, success is no longer only about what you can achieve yourself. You now have to think about crafting a clear vision, building partnerships, developing relationships and creating the conditions for others to perform and grow.

You don't have to become the leader you think you are supposed to be. You can become the leader you desire to be, and that transition takes work. Sometimes you need someone outside the organisation to help you navigate it. An external thinking partner who can challenge your assumptions, help you build trust and support you as you learn how to nurture and lead your team. If this resonates with you, contact me via this link for a confidential discovery conversation.

What works for me

A few years ago Marshall Goldsmith inspired me to ask the following six questions at the end of each day.

  1. Did I do my best to set clear goals today?

  2. Did I do my best to achieve the goals I set?

  3. Did I do my best to find meaning in life today?

  4. Did I do my best to be happy today?

  5. Did I do my best to support and bring out the best in others today?

  6. Did I do my best to learn something about myself today?

Nothing comes from nothing

"My good work should speak for itself."

It's a comforting belief, I just don’t think it is realistic. If quality alone were enough, no company would need a marketing department. Even excellent work stays invisible until the right people know about it. If you're running your own business or building your career, marketing is part of your job. That does not mean you have to love it, but it does mean someone has to do it, and right now that someone is you. Waiting to be noticed is not a strategy. Visibility comes from consistent, deliberate effort: sharing your work, telling your story, and showing up where your ideal clients or employers are. The results follow the effort you put in. I work on building my own brand every week. What is one concrete step you could take this week to make your work more visible?

No expectations

The insecure man feels threatened when another man succeeds, and the secure man is inspired by it. Which one are you?

I was raised secure, and my feminine values were encouraged rather than suppressed, and they became the foundation of how I lead and coach today. I think the same principle shows up in coaching itself. When someone chooses a coach, they are rarely moved by credentials, background, or methodology on their own. They are asking one question: what will this do for me? Will it change my career, my results, my life?

Studies suggest only 15% of buying behaviour is shaped by past experience. The other 85% is driven by the future someone can see for themselves. I think security works in the same way. It draws less from what you have already proven than from who you are becoming, and from not needing anyone else to be smaller for you to feel it.

““Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.” ”
— Carl Jung

Participation in consciousness

There are plenty of ways to separate wealthy people from their money without making them feel bad about it. Status works differently as you cannot remove or reduce someone's status and leave them feeling better for it. I think the same holds true in disagreement. Diminishing someone's status will not change their mind, it only makes them defend it harder. If you want someone to think differently, you have to let them keep their standing while they do it. That's the quieter skill, in coaching, negotiation, and leadership alike: challenging the thinking without touching the person's sense of who they are. Contact me via this link if you are ready to move from grumble to gratitude.

Coconuts fall at speed

Many organisations take credit for efficiency when, in reality, they are simply outsourcing work to the customer. Increasingly, the work we do online involves verification: proving that we are who we say we are. Technology often arrives as an option and gradually becomes an obligation. What was introduced to make life easier can end up creating more work for the very people it was supposed to serve.

I think there are certain decisions that benefit from human contact. Sometimes, we need to look someone in the eyes or, at the very least, hear their voice. There is something about human interaction that allows us to establish trust, read the situation and make a more informed judgement. As the West Indian proverb goes: “Trust grows at the speed of a coconut tree and falls at the speed of a coconut.”

There is a profound asymmetry between the time it takes to build trust and the time it takes to destroy it. Trust may be difficult to quantify, yet that does not make it any less valuable. Its benefits show up in the quality of our relationships, the decisions we make, the risks we are willing to take and the confidence we place in one another. Perhaps the challenge is that we often measure what is easy to count and overlook what makes things work. Just because trust is difficult to measure does not mean it is difficult to recognise when it is missing.

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Test and validate

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I have a deep passion for challenging injustice, whether in the arts, politics or law. I have never been particularly motivated by money. For me, it has always been about people: using communication to challenge what is wrong, create understanding and help make things right. At the heart of it is a genuine desire to help others.

I think leadership starts with listening and understanding what people need, what matters to them and what they want to achieve. As a leader, you can use your skills and experience to guide, encourage and nurture people. However, much of leadership is about creating the conditions in which people feel motivated, supported and empowered to realise their potential.

““Madness is something rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” ”
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Creative ideation

DFV = You start with desirability (Do consumers like it? Is it a welcome addition? Does it add value?), then filter it through feasibility (Can you actually do it?), and then the last step is viability (Can we make money on it? Is it worth doing?). The problem in business is we start with numbers, and numbers have a smaller solution space than words, thoughts and dreams do. I don’t think any of it works without trust as desirability, feasibility and viability all assume someone believes you enough to engage with the idea in the first place. So I would argue for adding trust to the front of the sequence: TDFV. Trust first, because without it, nothing downstream really matters. What do you think?

The burden of verification

Every transaction carries a hidden tax: the cost of proving it's safe to make. In a transactional relationship, that tax never goes away as every exchange has to be checked, justified, verified from scratch, because there's no history of trust to lean on. Relational capitalism on the other hand is what happens when that burden gets paid down over time, and trust becomes the discount rate.

There's transactional capitalism, where you maximise for the individual transaction, and there's relational capitalism, where you optimise for the lifetime discounted value of the relationship over time. I think shrewd companies move people from feeling transactional to feeling relational. Metaphorically, your customer is looking for a marriage, and the CFO is running an escort agency. The fundamental problem is that they look at the relationship in a much more transactional, much more short-term way.

I think lots of things that are long-term valuable in indeterminate ways, and don't lead directly to a transaction, get deemed worthless and that's the verification burden showing up again: if it can't be priced and proven in the moment, it doesn't count. What do you think?

The Quimbo Syndrome

How did a character who demonstrated courage and moral conviction become a symbol of cowardice?

Over the weekend, I came across something that challenged my understanding of Uncle Tom. After reading about the Quimbo Syndrome, I discovered that the character I had understood as a symbol of submission was, in the original novel, quite the opposite.

In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Uncle Tom is portrayed as a dignified and courageous man. When the brutal slaveholder Simon Legree demands that he reveal the whereabouts of two escaped enslaved women, Tom refuses. His defiance ultimately costs him his life. Sambo and Quimbo, two Black men who enforce Legree’s authority and participate in the brutal treatment of other enslaved people, view Tom’s refusal to comply as an act of defiance and they help carry out the violence against him.

The irony is that the original character of Uncle Tom was subsequently transformed through minstrelsy and popular culture into a stereotype of the submissive, cowardly Black man who seeks the approval of white people. That distortion has had a lasting impact and the term “Uncle Tom” became an insult, used to accuse Black men of betraying their own community through their perceived submission to white authority.

Meanwhile, the characters of Sambo and Quimbo represent a different form of complicity: participating in the oppression of others to maintain one's own position. I think this raises an uncomfortable question about the labels we use, the histories we inherit, and the assumptions we accept without examining them. Sometimes, understanding the history behind a label changes how we understand the people to whom it is applied.