Cultivated

The label genius is often misleading. We apply it to individuals — but when you look carefully at almost any significant creative achievement, the picture is more complicated.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not come from hard work. It comes from unclear work. This essay explores why clarity, alignment, and momentum are the three forces that determine whether effort becomes value.

An extraordinary amount of work is started — and just as quietly abandoned. The problem is not a lack of effort. It is a failure to close the loop between investment and value.

Most workplace problems are solved too quickly, with the first plausible answer. The PO method — Problem + Object — deliberately disrupts that pattern. A practical guide to lateral thinking and creative problem-solving at work.

At the start of 2022, I set myself a creative constraint: one idea about creativity, every day, for a month. It failed after six days. This is what came from it

In most organisations, attention is drawn relentlessly toward problems. Appreciative Inquiry offers a different stance — not naïve optimism, but a deliberate practice of understanding where value already exists and asking how it might be amplified.

Business storytelling works when it is disciplined and grounded in evidence. When it is not, it becomes decoration. This essay — from someone who spent years in journalism before applying these skills to organisations — explains why stories move people when facts alone do not, and how to build one.

I discovered the Cornell Note-Taking Method over a decade ago and promptly ignored it. It sounded dull and academic. Then I tried it properly. I have not really stopped since.

Some people communicate like vending machines — same input, same output, regardless of context. And then there are those who seem to have presence. The difference is adaptability. Here is how to develop it.