I’ve been in meetings with genuinely good facilitation: clear agendas, everyone invited to speak, where the real disagreement still surfaced afterwards, at someone’s desk. Amy Edmondson’s research is a useful check here: the teams that outperform aren’t the ones with the least friction. They’re the ones where people say the…
There is a word that is almost entirely absent from business education, and it predicts more of what we say we care about than any of the words we use instead. The word is mattering. Engagement, retention, performance, even leadership effectiveness — the research has been quietly converging for a…
In every meeting I’ve sat in, wellbeing gets nodded at as important, then quietly deprioritised the moment the roadmap gets tight. That’s less a values problem than a question about how the system is actually structured to respond under pressure. Here’s the number worth sitting with: only 9% of employees…
What if leadership focused less on fixing what is wrong and more on amplifying what is already working? Traditional approaches to organisational challenges can leave people focused on deficits, problems and what needs to be fixed. Appreciative Inquiry offers a different possibility. Developed by David Cooperrider and Ronald Fry, Appreciative…
When I studied Astrophysics between 1989 and 1995, I occasionally had lunch with my professor, sitting at the same table in the university canteen. When I told my father, he was both surprised and amazed. He could hardly believe that his son was sharing a table with a professor. To…
Entrepreneurship is often associated with ambition, innovation, and relentless action. Yet behind every successful entrepreneur lies something deeper: sustaining wellbeing while navigating uncertainty and growth. Research on entrepreneurial success has identified common characteristics among high-performers: passion, preparedness, assertiveness, self-motivation, perseverance, an internal locus of control, and a willingness to take…
There is a sentence that runs through everything we are building at HAANA: Wellbeing is not something we add to systems. It is something we design systems for. For many years I have found myself returning to a question that appears, in one form or another, wherever people come together to…
