Leadership development is broken – so, how do we fix it?

Posted by Cris Beswick
On 01/12/2020

Leadership development is broken! How does that statement make you feel? Do you see it as a personal attack and demand proof, or do you nod sadly and agree? And who do you blame; the system, leadership schools, your predecessors, your employer; or perhaps you accept some of the criticism yourself? Now whilst psychologists may […]

Leading FOR Innovation; It’s a numbers game!

Posted by Cris Beswick
On 25/11/2020

Let me make you a promise; nowhere in this article am I going to ask you where you see your leadership style sitting on a scale of 1-10. Nor am I going to set out to tell you that what you are doing is wrong. After all, every organisation is different, and every organisation may […]

If you want innovation, start with the right breakfast!

Posted by Cris Beswick
On 10/11/2020

Does culture still eat strategy for breakfast? That’s the question which I posted in a webinar which I was invited to present by ‘We are lean and agile’, a company whose vision statement is ‘making improvement easier for you.’ Through a mix of coaching and the deployment of Engage Process software they help organisations to […]

Are you tackling your innovation blockers?

Posted by Cris Beswick
On 03/11/2020

What is the number one innovation blocker in your organisation? That’s the question which the team at Solverboard, the all-in-one innovation platform, recently set out to answer. Building on the success of their 2019 report which looked at five key innovation challenges including measuring innovation and employee buy-in, the 2020 report [1] identified five areas […]

Owning the Innovation Agenda

Posted by Cris Beswick
On 05/10/2020

When the going gets tough, where are you to be found? Or is that an unfair question? You might even see it as a knee-jerk reaction to current circumstances, born out of the twin challenges of COVID and the ever-looming end of the Brexit transition period. Indeed, we can all acknowledge that over the past […]

Changing the organisational climate for innovation to thrive

Posted by Cris Beswick
On 24/08/2020

Hot summers, flash floods, intense storms; it’s hard to escape some of the more immediate impacts of climate change. But there are other impacts too, some of which scientists are yet to understand fully. Take the effects of climate change on permafrost, for example. Acting as a quasi-protective layer between the atmosphere and locked-in carbon […]

Identifying your innovation ecosystem red flags

Posted by Cris Beswick
On 11/08/2020

Innovation doesn’t work; our investment in innovation hasn’t delivered. When I hear comments from senior leaders like these, I come back time and time again to the apocryphal story of the person lost in the countryside who asks someone leaning on a gate for directions, to which the person replies; “well if it were me, […]

Joining the transformation and innovation dots

Posted by Cris Beswick
On 27/07/2020

No one is an island, so the saying goes, and the same is true of business concepts and delivery. Leadership theory, sustainability, lean project management, or indeed any other business practice cannot be taken in isolation. And if you try then the inevitable outcome is a clash between existing and new methodologies alongside confusion and […]

The Three Pillars of Innovation

Posted by Cris Beswick
On 06/07/2020

Numerous research studies consistently show companies that double-down on innovation during downturns, using the time as an inflexion point to reframe for an innovation-led recovery, outperform those that don’t over the long term. But, reframing in such a way requires the core pillars for innovation capability to be firmly in place and despite two-thirds of […]

Building bold strategies, one hypothesis at a time!

Posted by Cris Beswick
On 16/06/2020

With an abundance of global reports and surveys outlining the continued challenges faced by organisations in their quest to innovate, the single biggest issue we still see leaders make is not creating absolute clarity on strategy. And if you subscribe to the notion of “tomorrow’s prosperity is dictated by today’s leadership decisions” then innovation has […]