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You know what I’m sick and tired of being told to do? Challenge the status quo!

It’s seen as a power move. Leaders do it. Heroes do it.

Enshrined in vision statements and implored from the keynote stage, challenging the status quo is what we need to do to succeed, right?

Easy to say, hard to do.

Pointing to what needs to change or setting a vision for what a changed state looks like is the easy part – it’s hypothetical.

Actually embedding change is a behavioural influence exercise, which...

Customer not interested in proceeding?

When persuading customers, your work is less about moving them TOWARDS something, and more about getting them to MOVE AWAY from something else.

To get someone to buy, for example, we need to move them away from not having the product at all or using a competitor’s. 

That means not only talking up the benefits of our product - but planting the seed that they’ll be worse off if they don’t proceed. That they’ll be going backwards!  

For example, “Sounds...

My word for the year is different.

Or to put it a better way, different is my word for the year.

It’s been remarkably clarifying.

From taking a different path when walking the dog to changing parts of my website and taking on different projects, reminding myself to be ‘different’ has been powerful.

It’s helped me unshackle from my status quo.

I’m even writing differently. Have you noticed?

Looser. More conversational.

And in the spirit of that, I’m going to experiment with how often I ...

Note: This article was written before the referendum was held. It has now been updated to acknowledge the referendum was resoundingly beaten, with 61% of Australians voting No and 39% Yes. 

In business we spend a lot of time chasing ‘yes’.

Yes to buying from us. Yes to renewing. Yes to choosing us as their employer.

So it’s through this lens that I want to analyse the campaign for and against a Voice to Parliament. Behavioural science suggests that one side of the campaign has been much more ...

Convincing your boss to do something differently is one of the biggest frustrations people have. 

It’s not just your boss, of course. It could be any colleague whose support you need. 

So let’s walk through an example that I’ve shared with many of my clients.

How to convince your boss

Start with unifying language, tethering their objectives to yours.

“As you know, our task/objective is to get people to…”  

We’re using ‘our’ to tether their goals with ours. We want to signal we are a uni...