Chris's L&D Blog

I recently read a great article from the Harvard Business Review (HBR) on why you should create a “shadow board” to help tackle some of the increasing challenges around adapting to changes in your market. A lot of companies struggle with two apparently unrelated problems: disengaged younger workers and a weak response to changing market […]

In this delightful, hilarious talk, data journalist Mona Chalabi shares handy tips to help question, interpret and truly understand what the numbers are saying in a straight forward way.

So something I often think about within the analyst community is what the role of creativity and ideas play. As analysts it can be uncommon to think creatively and often think more more logically. The unfortunately side effect of this however is if one of us can’t solve a problem the rest, faced with the […]

PowerPoint 2010 has a new feature that’s very hard to find, but that people are praising over and over. It’s called Custom Shapes, and it’s a set of four tools that you can use to create your very own shapes. Why do you need Custom Shapes? To make your slides unique. For the flexibility to […]

At the Adobe Summit I saw a great talk around the importance of psychological safety in the workplace and how critical it is to high performing teams. So important in fact that Google launched a 2 year investigation that lead to it. Over two years they conducted 200+ interviews with Googlers (their employees) and looked at […]

During the Adobe Summit Amal Clooney, who was truly inspirational, talked about how they’re trying to use data to build a ‘justice index’ showing the quality of the justice system and laws in each country and how they change over time. The idea is that by being able to track this they would attempt to […]

During the Adobe Summit a speaker referenced an article from “Rebels at Work” citing their definition of what makes up a ‘bad rebel’ and a ‘good rebel’ which I found a really interesting concept. How many people in your team, who are ‘rebels’ are rebels for the good or the bad reasons? Or how often […]

We are each entitled to our own personal world view. Unfortunately, when it comes to interpreting information and making objective sense of reality, human brains are hard-wired to make all kinds of mental mistakes that can impact our ability to make rational judgments. In total, there are 180+ cognitive biases that mess with how we […]

Somebody in the team sent me this extract from a book they’re reading which I quite like the simplicity of, it’s a bit militant but I think the principle is quite valid. The first Law of Combat: Cover and Move. This is teamwork—every individual and team within the team, mutually supporting one another to accomplish […]

Not just a talk about how ‘pretty’ data visualisation is but how it can help to tell a story and the importance of visualising stuff appropriately to avoid people taking the wrong message.