Can’t delegate the culture We have hurtled into the future of work in the last few months.  For many the workplace has ceased to be the office and we have instead participated in a giant pilot of home working. Some people can’t wait for it to get back to “normal”.  Most never want it to…

There are three factors that make this the moment. Inability to rely on modelling as a decision making tool; Changes in society and media behaviours; New tech. First modelling. IPA Effectiveness Awards judging is ongoing.  As convenor this year I am all too well aware of how tough the process is, and what a huge…

Project Diamond is a single online reporting system supported by all the major TV broadcasters to measure the diversity of everyone on TV and everyone who makes TV. It works very simply.  If you are involved in any TV show, in front of or, behind the camera, in any way at all, then you are…

No more planning for the average How average are you?  Most people consider themselves above average.  It is a behavioural heuristic known as illusory superiority.  Yet planning for the “average” or typical person is normally how we make things work. Offices for example are planned for the average person.  Average size, average outgoing personality, and…

Can’t smell you, can’t touch you, can’t make eye contact with you, can you still motivate me? The movie director John Boorman has written that when he wanted to get the most out of a movie star during a shoot, he would make a small adjustment to their hair just before filming.  He said that…

Your video background is your brand What does your working space, and what you choose to reveal about it say about you? We are in the business of brand building, we know how crucial it is to consider what is on show as well as what is said or done.  You will be judged on…

We are going through a very large jerk. There are roughly two theories about how evolution works.  Charles Darwin, who wrote the book on evolution, was a believer in gradualism, slow change over millennia.  For many years this was regarded as scientific fact.  But if this was the case you would expect to see a record…

The long and the short needs some additions: the medium term and the very long. The ad industry and marketing is familiar with the collective wisdom of the IPA best practice papers summed up by Binet and Field’s paper The Long and the Short of It where the importance of balancing short term tactics with…

We’re in survival mode.  And this affects each of us in different ways.  A recent assessment of how consumers are feeling includes this list: Anxiety; Isolation; Loneliness; Boredom; Thankfulness; Community spirit; Slow Living; Personal growth.  And, of course, it describes how we are all feeling too. There’s been a faster transformation in how we work…

International Women’s Day is a very important milestone in the year.  And this year the executive director of the United Nations Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka has said that this is a massive year for gender equality. On the days around the official date I am reminded of the issues that women face worldwide.  That for…

We’re all enormously influenced by the stories we heard as children, even as adults. Psychological theory states that we are, perhaps, more influenced by the stories that we have forgotten, than the ones that we remember; more in thrall to our unconscious, the stories from our very earliest years, than from the myths and tales…

It’s the essential ingredient for success in the 2020s.  Grit is, for me, what makes watching top sports professionals so fascinating.  Often, they will have had very similar training and coaching programmes.  The technology that they use is mandated to be similar.  (There are sometimes exceptions when the rules of the sport are challenged by new…