The Blogworld of Poppyfish People Development

The room was bursting with undergraduates. In fact, had Roy Castle and Norris McWhirter walked in then the Record Breaking nature of what was about to happen would have been plain for all to see. Simulations involving over 60 people in one open session are rare beasts. Yet thanks to a chance conversation with Dr Tassos Patokos of the University of Hertfordshire Business School we, and his sixty students, were about to indulge ourselves exactly that. My mind went back to the chat Dr Patokos and I had over a glass of wine at a conference three months earlier. We had moved on from the euro-crisis and had started finding a more stable common ground, discussing how simulations can inject energy and creativity into learning. An expert in Game Theory, Dr Patokos was eager to see how such events played out, and how they might offer learning opportunities in which his undergraduate students could experience a different perspective on their work topics. We agreed to set somet...

Ask anyone what they would do if they could travel in time and sooner or later someone will tell you they would go forward to the next lottery draw date, so they could return to the present day and buy the winning ticket. This week the Euromillions lottery is another roll over. Visualising the future isn’t easy. But never mind our own fanciful dreams of lottery riches, for managers and leaders creating strategy in today’s organisations seeing into the future is an essential skill, yet developing this foresight can be incredibly difficult. Taking the brave first steps now in a change programme to move your company towards an uncertain future can be even harder. How can we know what the future will hold? If only we could travel through time. If only we had a machine to take us there…. In Poppyfish simulations the scenario is our vehicle to the future. Climbing aboard a simulated exercise that projects your business into the future can be the vehicle that enables our expl...

Being a snow bully is snow joke… Everyone knows a snow bully . Snow bullies just love it when the snow comes, for this is the chance for them to shine. A snow bully will walk 15 miles through waist high drifts   just to attend a meeting that no-one else can get to. They will take the country lanes route to work when everybody else sticks to the main and treated roads. They will have snow shoes that they purchased from a specialist Alpine shop exactly for this kind of situation. They have a spare pair of dry socks that they keep in their desk for this type of crisis, and a glove compartment stuffed full of energy bars. Oh yes, they are well organised to cope with a little bit of snow. Unlike you, you pathetic ‘snow victim’ … A snow victim never wanders far from their slippers when the snow arrives. They are the first to fret about how the snow stops them from doing things. Much to the outward frustration (but inner victory) of the snow bully they will not be at today’s m...

The Art of Delegation I don't often blog about management tips, but when I talk to experienced managers and leaders about what challenges them in their working lives one of the consistent responses I get (and one that is often reinforced when speaking to their teams) is that they have trouble delegating work. This always surprises me. Not only that, but everyone involved seems to accept this weakness with a smile and a shrug of the shoulders as if to say, 'oh well, it is just the way they are'.     When I question them about this attitude. A common response by those self-confessed bad delegators is to justify the lack of concern by stating that they avoid delegation because they believe that passing the job to somebody else takes too long. How many times have you heard people around you say “ It’s quicker to do it myself ”? Often, this is offered as a justification for them choosing to perform a piece of work that they know could have been per...

Understanding how a critical incident develops can help us to know what to expect when an incident happens for real. So far this year there have already been a number of high profile critical incidents affecting organisations. Most recently the escalation of the Algerian hostage crisis has been a major news story. Last week, the first ever helicopter crash in London sparked a critical incident that, whilst more local in impact, was headline news and impacted organisations caught up in the maelstrom of unfolding events.   Studying how the news unfolded in this stand alone tragic accident can help us to assess the realism of the timelines in our own continuity exercises and critical incident simulations. In this blog post I present a timeline for the helicopter incident and briefly discuss critical incidents from an organisational impact perspective. Building the timeline What I have done below is to build a timeline of the helicopter crash incident, as best as I have been ...