My phone was safely stowed in my bag.

That was a choice, though not a hard one. I’ve done plenty of digital detox, and this was not one of them.

As I looked around me, everybody was on their phone. We pick it up, it helps to pass time, to distract us. I get it. But when we allow ourselves to be consumed by something we guarantee that we don’t see anything else.

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I see it as a parent too, the long car journeys when I see something cool out of the window and point it out to the kids. By the time they gaze up from their phones, it’s gone.

They don’t miss anything life-changing, but they do miss something simply different. They’ll never know unless they look. The phone was a guaranteed stream of something, the window offered the possibility of something unexpected.

Sometimes there will be something worth seeing but we only find it if we are open to looking. That possibility of something is worth protecting in my view.

We focus here, we notice this. It’s like the skill sits in directing our focus, finding the perfect thing worthy of our time, and focusing intently on it. But what if the real skill is actually the opposite of that? What if managing our attention were actually about reducing focus?

Maybe to be open to something you need to be closed to something else.

That is a decision, one many leaders don’t make, at least not explicitly and not honestly; what they are willing to call ‘a distraction’ that they should be closed to more often.

I am not referring to the obvious waste like phones. What I mean is the pointless meeting or the activity masquerading as legitimate work. A packed calendar, back to back calls, pursuit of inbox zero. These are often things keeping you from something else. They fill the space where possibility could be.

Dare to call it a distraction, even if it looks like work.

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Your diary has this opportunity every day

The best executive assistants I had understood that their job was to keep people (more realistically, unnecessary meetings people asked for) out of my agenda. Protecting the space between things. My EA’s understood something that many leaders will take years to learn, that all empty space is not wasted time. It’s not inefficiency; it is the art of leadership.

There is space for thinking, there is space for possibility.

This week I had a handful of Zoom calls with people I didn’t know that well. I gave them my time from the “slush fund of unallocated time” not devoted to anything fixed this week.

Time box devotees amongst you may read this and wince - “How can anybody have unallocated time? How inefficient!”

New ideas emerged from these calls. If my diary had been wall to wall with meetings and appointments, they would have been missed.

I am not arguing that everything should be deep focused solitary work. Cal Newport and others have done this brilliantly already. Protecting time for deep work matters, but that is not what most leaders are missing.

Being in control of your time, and being available when it matters most are not the same thing.

The practice for managers to get on top of

People often lose track of their schedule in their time when they start managing people. But what if you saw 20% of your diary as being available for the stuff you’ve got no idea is coming? That to me is being a manager.

A colleague needs five minutes of your time, and that turns into a longer conversation. Someone stops you in the corridor with a question that deserves a real answer, not an off the cuff one. Someone shares something insightful while making tea in the kitchen.

I think the more seniority you hold, the more responsibility and more demands in your time, the more you need to show you are indeed available. Not just physically either.

A leader who is everywhere and technically available, but not actually available in the way that people will need them because they’re mentally focused on something else.

The one who’s got their eyes on the dashboard and every KPI the minute they enter into the meeting. They already know what they’re looking for and they don’t start to listen.

That’s the sort of leader who fills the silence with their own voice, never hearing what the silence, the body language, and the shifting on seats might have to have to say.

People who focus intently on something can feel oriented, but this often comes at the cost of the open mind, the cost of not being ready for the unexpected.

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Your diary is your leadership philosophy, visible to others

Your diary shows without ambiguity what you believe matters. Do you have space that isn’t dedicated to something, space to allow you to breathe or to think, to be available?

I have a date with myself every Friday for what I call Blue Sky Thinking. Simply space that’s open; available in case there’s something that matters..

I use it to remove things from my calendar or carry forward things that might be important. I use it to subtract to create availability, and freeing my mind in the process too.

Your diary is the first signal your thinking is under threat, one meeting at a time as the space for possibility gets filled with things that may simply be a CYA for others who want your presence, not your contribution.

Whatever your people might need from you today, they may not have told you and you won’t see any of it if you’re already looking fixedly, at something else.

The question is whether you’ve got any time left after you’ve pencilled in everything else you choose to focus on.

Have a great week.

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there

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It was a phrase that stung. Perhaps one that even prompted shame. Both my parents were teachers, grandparents were teachers. Many people I know are teachers too. I was already in the business world when I heard it, so it wasn’t that it made me avoid a career choice. I did perhaps double down on doing, not steering towards teaching. I saw the practicality of doing, rather than advising, as the stronger route. Wrongly so.

What I should have asked sooner

As I reflect now, it would’ve been better to instantly challenge the phrase, or seek to understand it. But young and impressionable as I was, I took it on face value.

Years later, I decided to see where it came from, having held teaching in such a poor light. It was contrary to everything I was seeing, and the art of teaching itself, so I looked again.

Origins of the phrase are traced to the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, who used it as a dig at revolutionaries or reformers. The idea that those who can no longer bring about change, decide to teach others how to do it. Retreating into words instead of actions.

This was never aimed at the teaching profession, but it did indeed contribute to negative views of the teaching profession, suggesting teachers are those who have failed in their profession.

His words, “He who can does, he who cannot, teaches.” have themselves been attributed to many people, as the phrase itself became distorted. The origin itself being as disputed as the meaning it seems.

Many other public figures have added to it, including Woody Allen I believe, “Those who can’t do, teach; and those who can’t teach, teach gym.”

There is no sense in these lines. There is often no sense in phrases we pass around, and yet we frequently fail to challenge them.

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What else are we not questioning?

In the world of work, we throw phrases, buzzwords, catch phrases around too often and we assume understanding. We take the absence of questions or nodding of heads to mean understanding. We never check in enough to see if the way people interpret what we say is actually what we meant.

How many other phrases, like the one I misread, occupy the minds of bright people shaping their future, and inadvertently affect the actions they take or those actions that they seek to avoid?

For leaders, ensuring that what you want to communicate not only lands well, but is understood in the way you had intended it to be perceived, is a skill. It’s one I seek to improve regularly as it is core to so many things in work, in society, in cultures.

Do we set environments where people are comfortable challenging when their interpretation is sketchy or if we leave them unclear? I hope so. But hope is not a plan, we need intentionality to make a change. We need to check in and be ready to repeat, re-phrase and reload when we communicate words.

Teaching is actually mastery

There is more when we look closer at teaching. Teaching itself accelerates the teacher’s understanding.

As I mature in my own career, I invest more time in developing others, mentoring or coaching too, and helping people learn. I regularly take the stage to share thoughts and distil ideas for others, be that leadership or the industries and challenges that have made my own career so varied.

Having accountability, or the responsibility to nurture people, that’s not necessarily a harder thing. It is different.

I am perhaps evolved enough now to become a teacher, a voice that can help. The irony here is that I wouldn’t be capable of doing this if I hadn’t already done some of this. So being able to teach, is in my view, not only a luxury, it seems to be something you reach as you progress. It feels like a compliment, a reward, and indeed a responsibility.

But learning itself, is never finished, and I believe the idea that if you want to really master something, you should try teaching it. The very act of trying to explain it in more simple terms, to those not yet of the same understanding, forces you to revisit what you really know about something and distil it. Cutting it down to its bare bones.

I remind myself that if I can’t explain something to a four-year-old I don’t understand it fully myself.

I am a leader, speaker and author, and very much still learning in all of them. In trying to teach some of them, I learn continuously, I stay open for feedback and I improve

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This past week in India I spent time with some seriously inspiring entrepreneurs. Some of whom are building teaching institutions, some involved in teaching too. Caring for the minds of many generations. Thinking and designing what people need to learn, and delivering the messages to create the societies we need in the future. It is really important work. I also had a glimpse of the skills it takes to get that all off the ground. To continue to shape positively, the most difficult of audiences, young impressionable minds, is one of the hardest tasks there is.

I was in India for some speaking engagements. I was tackling topics around data and automation and human judgment, and although I had done what I thought was a good job in distilling the big ideas, a very helpful question from the audience helped me take the chance to simplify it even further. Removing words I had taken for granted as being widely understood, which perhaps could have sent someone in the wrong direction. Easy to do, and easy to call out if we are brave enough.

I received a lesson, whilst I was teaching one.

I wrap up the week with new admiration for the teaching profession. I am inspired too, to do better myself, to impart learnings where I can, to help the minds that I touch as a leader, a speaker, and an author and of course as human being.

I want to get better at all of it, so I seek to be worthy enough to teach.

I am starting to look at mechanisms that would prompt me to question more frequently.

How would you know if you are on the receiving end of a phrase that needs another look?

Have a great week.

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.

Some people just look at the price and turn up, though often they get something different than they expected. That’s not because the hotel changed, but because the picture they viewed or the image they had in their head was not enough to build honest expectations.

Same destination, completely different experience on arrival and the journey to get there.

But then I think, who chose what was in the photographs? Who chose what was in the information provided and what they missed out? That moment shapes much of what follows. Building expectations long before anybody packs a bag.

Perhaps that’s what I do when I make bigger decisions. I don’t just mean the hotels or the restaurant booking, but the decisions that affect other people. Decisions that I have to communicate or defend and to pass to other people to carry without me in the room.

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The curator hiding in plain sight.

The hotel, the supermarket shelf, the annual report, the spa menu, the townhall presentation.

Everywhere we make decisions somebody up stream has already decided what information we deserve to see. I don’t just mean the photograph that shows the pool and doesn’t show the building site next door. It’s also the packaging that shows the farm and not the factory. The leadership communication that announces the destination but doesn’t even attempt to describe the journey the lead to the decision.

We see this in politics. Announcements without reasoning, decisions handed down with the expectations that people can just see themselves in it and get on with in. Destinations without journeys. People lose trust in those making these decisions.

We think we’re making an informed decision but we’re not. The quality of any decision is only as good as the completeness of the information the completeness of the picture we use and that we were shown. There’s always somebody else who decides what’s in the frame what we get to see.

We’re not just making a decision we are continuously working from curated photographs making potentially curated conclusions.

We have all been on the receiving end of this, it isn’t great. But consider now if you changed positions.

When it’s your turn to hold the camera or set the frame in the backdrop do you know that you’re doing it? Are you conscious of what you’re leaving out?

The questions you ask shape what matters.

When you lead others to a decision, to a strategy, to a destination or to a restructure, you are effectively that photographer, that curator.

You see more information than the people you lead. You sat in more information sessions and pre-decisions and you read data they never saw. You took part in trade-offs they weren’t asked about. Then you communicated a decision.

Now here’s the bit most leadership thinking skips over. As you arrive at your decision, it’s not the information itself that tells you what to conclude, it needs to be evaluated or chewed over first. The way to do that is the questions that you bring to it and the things you push back on. The things you dive deep or the things you don’t take for granted. These don’t always come from the data. The new perspectives come from what you value and what you pushed to uncover.

This is why the journey matters, not just the destination. We are all different.

Two leaders in the same room observing identical information can arrive at completely different decisions because they feel different things were worth asking. They see different things in the data.

One asks about costs, another one asks how it costs other people it will land on. One of them asks if it works, when the other asks whether it can be explained to somebody who wasn’t in the room and didn’t have the details. That not a flaw in the process, but a human angle. We bring ourselves to decisions and we can leverage it beyond that moment.

The quality of the decision isn’t just about the information available. It’s very much about how you interrogate it. Your experience, your judgement, your intuition and your willingness to simply ask what the data is not saying as much as what it is.

Did you try to find the angle for the person that wants to see the view past the hotel? Do you try to provide the information that helps the person with poor mobility access services near your hotel? Did you consciously omit it?

Every decision is like the hotel booking with information that affects a ‘go’ or ‘no go’, and the amount of satisfaction that accompanies it in real life.

What matters is crucially whether you feel enough responsibility toward the people who are going to live with the decision, and to ask the questions on their behalf as you decide.

When two people arrive at the same hotel, one researched it and is happy, the other didn’t and feels they don’t get their money’s worth. The pictures sold a great luxurious room, but not services that matched that expectation. They feel mislead, not because anything was a lie, but because it was incomplete information to form the right expectation.

Take people with you early

This happens in the world of work too where people are told the destination not the trade-offs. The reorganisation that didn’t explain why the last structure had to go. Leaders left in the middle unable to answer questions why.

When you make a decision on behalf of others, you become responsible for how they live with or in the decision. Whether a decision lands in reality or not doesn’t sit with decision-maker alone, but with those they need to take it forward.

Leaders who shortcut the journey and simply gives an answer or a partial picture don’t help anybody carry it forward.

People don’t lose faith in decisions per se, but they do lose faith in those who make decisions. Not because the destination is wrong, but because they turn up unprepared.

When you show me how you arrived at your decision it helps you take me with you. When you think about others while deciding, you made decisions that already start to work.

We will never have complete information, not perfect frames or photos to work from. That is not the aim.

The aim is to bring everything you can to evaluating what you have as input. To ensure your values shape the questions you asked, and that those questions were asked on behalf of everyone who will travel with you.

I know I don’t sleep well next to a building site. I know my kids don’t freely walk too far to the amenities. I take that into account. I look further, even though we are all persuaded by the glorious pictures around the pool and the attractiveness of the price, that makes it possible.

I know that when we hit the pillow after a long journey, everybody will be contented. That is, when everybody’s considerations showed up at least in the process of research and not just in price.

So next time you make a decision ask yourself, are you sharing the full picture? Or have you set people up for disappointment when they arrive?

Have a great week.

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.

I have had visions of smooth, sharp flint spearheads this week, finding some convincing shapes in the garden. I started thinking about the quality of tools, and wondering when we stopped making them ourselves? In the Stone Age everybody made their own tools as well as use them. Making and using them sat with one person. Survival skills.

And then, copper arrived and later again the bronze age and all that changed. Not a one-man operation. Making the tools became much more specialist. You needed knowledge, specialist conditions - at least in terms of heat and more than a one-person cave on a mountainside. So most people stopped making. You didn’t need to understand how to mix metal and actually make tools. You simply had to use them. A farmer didn’t need to know how to build, he just needed to want a better plough. The hunter got a better spear. It was improvement.

We have always let the specialist be master of the making of it and the rest of us master the using of it. This didn’t slow us down, it accelerated us.

The Pattern Continues For Centuries

Fast forward to today. We all use phones and a fraction of us know exactly how to get the full maximum amount of them let alone build them. We drive cars that few of us know how to build. Each of us has a body most of us will never fully understand, let alone will be able to build it at a cellular level. Our body is perhaps the most sophisticated computer we will ever own and we don’t even need instructions to use it. (perhaps we need some to look after it but that’s probably a different article.)

The Internet, the electricity, and for a large part also the foods we consume. When did we ever all really need to know how to build it in order to use it? We don’t even know or need to know how to fully understand it in order to get started.

Now AI arrives and I am feeling that AI is being treated differently. AI admittedly it’s going to be a disruptor. It’s a paradigm shift. Yet we’re either hesitating to start because we don’t understand it, or feeling that to do well with it means we need to build.

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Where is the messaging coming from?

I caught myself doing it too this week. I’m learning to use AI but as I dabble and play with multiple tools, I am diving in but also, I’m wondering should I be learning differently?

When I see social media, news, new products, events, I realize it’s all around us culturally. Let’s build, let’s create with it. High energy and excitement.

Somewhere within that mixture of passion to get going, and anxiety to not be left behind, is the same assumption. Should we all be building and if we are not, then are we falling behind?

Seeing it differently

Without seeing it instantly, I was all scooped up in the noise around me with builders being close to me. I felt I should be doing that too. I almost outsourced my thinking. I took someone else’s lens.

The builder bias that I’m feeling surrounding AI is not driven from bad intentions or aspirations. It’s simply that the loudest voices at least in proximity to me are skewed more to builders.

But most people aren’t builders. I’m not necessarily a builder. You don’t need to be either.

AI doesn’t need to be different but it does need the confidence and even the permission to get started.

The anxiety of the fear many people have about AI is only natural. This is new but we remove that fear and find more clarity when we stop confusing AI literacy with AI engineering.

Just as we expect everybody to read, but we don’t expect everybody to write a book. This era is one where we should help everybody to adopt AI to be curious about AI, but that doesn’t mean build.

Aim for fluency. Simply learn to be comfortable with and around the tools.

My AI insight this week was not technical. It was simply that some patterns from the past are worth repeating. We saw a new tool, we accepted a new tool, picked up a new tool and used a new tool.

So my question for you is simple:

Are you surrounded by builders or users? That answer will tell you whose lens you are looking through.

Have a great week.

Fiona

Look Again. See what was always there

25 years ago I went with a friend to help choose some art for their home. I left with a painting I hadn’t planned to buy, in a country where I wasn’t living and with no clear logistics to get it home.

Three boats on a pristine beach. Deep blue sky. White sand. It was captivating. As I stood in front of it, I could feel the beating heat of the midday sun. There was no actual sun in the picture, no yellow. But I could feel it nonetheless. I described what I felt so that my friend could see how he could know when a piece of art was right. I didn’t know any other rationale. I realised then that I had been inside the painting for at least 20 minutes.

Great art does that. Put you in the picture that transports you away from your surroundings and utterly focuses you, and your mind. You feel it you are part of it. I’m not a painter so I don’t know if that’s what they aim for, but I do know when I speak I want my audience to be captivated.

It moved me so much that I purchased it. It was my first original canvas. It wasn’t a practical purchase. In fact it was months before I found an affordable way to easily transport it overseas to join me. But I wasn’t prepared to walk away from it. The cost of losing felt higher than the cost of committing. I guess that’s what judgement looks like. Not the absence of doubt, but the clarity and the confidence of a risk that’s worth taking, and the willingness to act.

I’ve never regretted that painting and it has adorned every fireplace in the places I’ve lived in during those 25 years. It still makes me smile.

Translation

Most leaders aim to be understood. Best in class may aim to be felt. If we think in logic and use data to help decide, then want to try and land an outcome in someone’s mind, there is a translation step needed. So many people skip the translation step, but when you skip it your message doesn’t get remembered. For those who don’t skip it, their messages, their strategies live and get carried. They exist in the minds of the people they were made for, such that they are able to take action because they can feel it. Between thinking and speaking their is a choice. What do you want people to see?

Frame it

Why not start with a picture? An actual one or a mental image, just give people something to aspire to. Don’t start with your words, even though you’re going to communicate much with them. The best communicators start with the image they want to leave behind and they build backwards. Words become effectively the artist brushstrokes as they paint that image in your mind.

I plan for communications and presentations by asking myself:

• What do I want my audience to think?

• What do I want them to feel?

• What do I want them to do?

I learned that precise framing from a wonderful communication coach, though I realised I was doing it through pictures without being aware.

I storyboard and I start with the final slide, what I want you to leave with and work backwards. What arguments, data or images would I need to put together so people believe and leave with that idea. I do the same whether it’s a new plan, a strategy, a major decision.

Many people start with words and hope that the picture will form. I’m not sure that it does.

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Pictures make it easier

I continually create metaphors, not because they’re catchy or as a decoration to my speeches, but because they help translate my ideas. They take something unfamiliar, something difficult, something complex and compare it to something familiar. That familiarity evokes a feeling. That is association is often enough. Enough to build your picture.

The formula starts with a question, for every pitch, every development conversation if it matters.

What is the picture I’m trying to paint?

Don’t ask, what information do I want to deliver? Ask how do you want somebody to feel when they relive or recall your topic months from now? Which image will make you and the topic memorable?

That is the formula it’s not just the clarity of the completeness it’s the way that you capture the topic and their imagination.

Three boats, deep blue sky, perfect white sand. No sun in the painting. I can still feel the heat.

The portability of ideas, plans or decisions matters. Thinking whether a picture will travel without you in the room, depends on the picture you paint.

Let me ask you. What is the picture you are building next in your work, and will it travel once you have left the room?

Have a great week.

Fiona

Look twice. See what was always there.

Is it the process or the output that matters? I reflect on that question a lot when I look at why I started writing, for whom I write, and where the pleasure is. I never set out to be a writer. When reading story books to my kids when they were younger, some of the rhymes felt forced and they jarred with me. One syllable too many. Trivial yes, but when your day has been one long test of your patience from sleep deficit to broken bottles, spilt milk, endless washing and the usual round of bedtime tantrums, the tiny things can seem far more irksome than they might actually be, when you are not your normal wide awake and intellectually engaged self. I just wanted to fix the rhythm, and do it myself.

I remember the symmetry and timbre of the sentences sat with me. I would hum a tune and retro fit words rhythmically. It became a regular thing. A handful of actual children’s books emerged from that time; some built together with the kids as they chose rhyming works with me. I may publish them one day too.

Trains and Planes

Back in the business world I travelled a lot. And, not a fan of sitting still in a confined space, I found myself reaching for my pen and notebook to write as a distraction when trains stalled and planes sat, sometimes for hours on runways. I passed the time making more rhymes. The mechanism of writing became the point.

What started as a deflection became a skill and something I began to enjoy. I still enjoy it. There’s satisfaction in seeing something coming together. I used it to capture events for my team and play them back to the organisation as an end of year poem. It surprised and delighted people and soon that too became a tradition.

In all of these I didn’t start with the end in mind. I simple started. The process of writing became thinking by doing, and slowly perhaps more valuable than other outputs I had created. I was exploring something differently. I wrote to fix something as a challenge, but then I wrote to lose myself in the experience. Now I largely write to help others see differently, writing itself being one of the ways I do that myself.

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No Spoilers

I am not the sort of person that reads the end of the book first and then settles in for a story that no longer holds suspense. I take the enjoyment form the whole story - build up, peak, ending. The journey through the book is very much how we absorb enough to remember the ending long after the cover is closed. Why would we skip the joy of that?

I can’t help thinking that we are doing some of that but not calling it a spoiler. I don’t mean skipping to the end of the Netflix series because you don’t have time to watch all the episodes. I mean the sort of stuff where we’re beginning to use AI as a tool.

As I’ve been writing my second book, I’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that I do the writing and not AI for the obvious reason of ownership. But when it comes to other types of written documents, a report, an overview, a performance summary, an email response, how much is too much? Is less AI, more? I don’t think everybody shares my thinking.

This is exactly where our use of AI is short circuiting thinking. That may work for mindless admin and repetitive tasks that give little joy but do we go too far?

As we race to adopt AI and drive productivity and greater intelligence, I do believe we need to preserve critical thinking alongside it. Writing builds communication and creativity, precisely the core skills we need to embrace alongside our tech journey. Strangely I don’t see the commitment to developing these skills in any way like the commitment to dive in and try AI, or to sign up and learn it formally. I don’t think I’ll be on my own in noticing that the adoption of AI challenges that very aspect of my writing that I value.

If we use AI to shortcut processes and reach outcomes more quickly, be that the year-end reflection, the poem of thanks, even the strategy document, we skip the process that makes the contents better, more refined. We miss building the thinking muscle.

Show The Working Out

AI can give us outputs, but it cannot give us the thinking, questionably not the enjoyment either if we skip to the end. These only happen when we do the work ourselves.

I see the same challenge with my kids, now grown-up using calculators for school. It’s quicker, the answer pops up, but it is hit and miss or more accurately all or nothing in terms of points on an exam that ways. I always remember having to show how I got there, gaining marks show for my working out. Again, it was learning how to do things yourself first, then automate.

It’s not that we need to do everything ourselves. I’m a huge fan of leveraging technology but not when it takes away the things that will help us exist in tandem alongside it as humans. Thinking is like any muscle, if you don’t use it, you lose it.

I believe the joy is in the journey from A to B, not just the destination. The same is true for the process of writing for me. It helps me to refine my thoughts, to sharpen my argument and hopefully to appeal to you to do the same, or at least think carefully and slowly about not doing it.

Let me know what and indeed how you think and how you protect and develop your thinking skills.

Have a great week.

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.

Turquoise, the colour of warm, clear waters, the sort you can see all the way to the bottom. Nothing hidden, just a pure unobstructed view of what is beneath.

I want my thinking and communication to be clear enough that people can see all the way through to the idea underneath, and believe it. That’s why I am here.

The magpie has it too

Double Magpie, is a brand for my ideas that I created nearly 20 years ago, though it hasn’t always been visible.

The magpie is full of angles. People see a noisy, opportunistic bird, collecting shinny things. What they miss, if they never look twice, is one of the most cognitively sophisticated creatures alive. Fiercely intelligent. Drawn to what glints. Impossible to ignore once you really see it. Positive in most culture too. And that iridescent blue/green tail. Catch it at a different angle, a different light, from a different direction and suddenly it is, in my view, extraordinary. It’s not black and white like we think, it is a shade of turquoise. We just needed to shift our view.

This is my point.

So what is The Turquoise Bit?

It’s for people who are done sleepwalking.

The world is moving fast, it’s relentless and it is too easy to just keep going the same way. Making decisions, leading teams, building businesses, living lives, yet never really stopping to look at what’s in front of us. What matters.

We rush past the detail things, accept the first version and in doing that we might miss what makes us unique and miss an idea that could change everything.

The turquoise bit is the space where we slow down enough to look again, playfully, but seriously too.

What would you find here?

I write about thinking differently, not just conceptually, but as practice. Stories, metaphors and the splash of colour that makes it come to life.

The sort that could change how you lead, how you decide, how you communicate and how you see the world you’re walking through, maybe even appreciate more of it.

That might sometimes mean sitting with a difficult decision a bit longer, asking what’s really in the bag of tools that you bring to it - your values, your experience, your gut feel, your stories and the trust that people have in you. Sometimes asking a better question of the data.

Sometimes it might just mean watching the grass grow or playing. Letting an idea take shape, often visually, not forcing it. I’m hoping you’ll find and trust that slowing down does not equal falling behind.

Whatever it looks like, I’ll keep it honest. I’ll share what I’m still working out not just what I’ve already solved. I’ll ask questions and I’ll try to write the same turquoise clarity that I’m always chasing, so you can see all the way through to the clear underneath and decide for yourself what it’s worth.

So who am I?

Hello, I’m Fiona McDonnell a mum of two, with 30 years leadership in large business under my belt and a world view that’s been shaped living, working and travelling through many countries, cultures, and languages.

I believe that the most important shift any of us can make in business, in leadership and in life, is to simply stop accepting the first version of what we see, to question and to let things be simpler. My upcoming second book Decisions That Carry grows from the same place, a belief that answer and the trust we need are already there if we change what we combine and how we look.

I spent years working with leaders who are capable of extraordinary things and sometimes they need someone to hold up the light at a different angle so that they can see what was always there. That’s what I do. That’s what I hope this is for you.

Your turn

I’d love to know about you. What made you stop and read this, what you’re looking for and perhaps what you now suspect could be worth a second glance? Feel free to tell me in the comments. Thank you for being here.

Fiona

Look twice. See what was always there