Over the last 6 months I have been designing, testing and piloting an exciting new Change Management Game for leaders and teams which lets them experience what it is like to lead a complete 9-month change management project over the course of a single day. The development process forced me to think through what I really believe to be the key principles of change management in a sufficiently clear and concrete way to be able to design an online/offline game round them. Here is what I ended up with:

In the recent UK floods we heard a lot about defences failing and phrases being bandied about by engineers and managers such as "a once in a hundred years" event and "could never have been envisaged." However when I hear these types of explanations it always makes me think instead of the crucial differences between a promise, a responsibility and a guarantee.

Diane Koutu, writing for Harvard Business Review, suggests 3 very useful distinctions around being resilient. I like them because they addresses some of the weaknesses of otherwise excellent schools of thought such as Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism - namely that it encourages people just to soldier on and put a brave face on things and not ask for help which can be seen as failure.

There are about half a dozen basic dilemma stereotypes which underpin almost all of the operational and strategic issues which challenge leaders today. These are so prevalent and pervasive I call them the META DILEMMAS because they are present in virtually every leadership situation.

In his unique book "Dialogue and the art of thinking together" William Issacs introduces the Four-Player System originally developed by David Kantor. This is a very important technique for supporting real collaborative thinking in teams.

It has been said that how a team decides how to decide is the most important decision it will make. I am pleased to feature a very interesting article by Jamie @ THOUGHT Stream which suggests practical tips for engaging your team, getting buy-in and how to use the Bioteams Action Zones and Rules to help.

Learned Optimism is an approach to self-improvement invented by American psychologist, Doctor Martin Seligman and described in his book, Learned Optimism (1990). Seligman argues for the benefits of an optimistic outlook and describes how to learn to be optimistic.

"If we want to do something creative, outside the box, innovative and un-traditional I am doubtful that sitting in a traditional meeting room, having a traditional meeting and following a traditional meeting script is going to move us toward that vision". Jamie Billingham summarises best practices for radically improving meetings.

Imagine the scenario. The all-day team workshop went so well. You just stopped short of a group hug. You finished off by agreeing the actions. Everyone was so pumped up and committed. Fast forward 2 weeks and all the actions are forgotten - just words on a page somewhere! Sounds familiar? What went wrong and how do you stop it next time?

A lot of my work involves facilitating large meetings where groups need to collaborate to resolve difficult issues or develop future plans for working together. Over the last 12 months I have started to share 4 Golden Rules with the participants which always seem to significantly improve the results we get. Here they are!