Le nouveau livre d'Andy, Quelque Chose Me Dérange, sera disponible sur Amazon et auprès d'autres distributeurs à partir du 10 septembre ... Quelque Chose Me Dérange offre une nouvelle perspective sur les conversations professionnelles difficiles, vous aidant à naviguer dans leur complexité avec compréhension et sérénité. À l'aide d'une terminologie simple, illustrée magnifiquement par le troll émotionnel de Philippe Tur, le livre explique comment gérer un échange franc—la clé de la résolution...

Andy’s new book, Something’s Troubling Me, will be available on Amazon and through other distributors from 10th September … Something’s Troubling Me provides a new perspective on Difficult Professional Conversations, helping you to navigate their complexity with understanding and serenity. Using simple terminology, illustrated beautifully by Philippe Tur’s emotional troll, the book explains how to manage a candid exchange—the key to resolving a difficult conversation. Something’s Troubling Me...

According to reliable sources, there are currently 8,045,311,447 people in the world. 35% of them are either under 15 or over 65, so they have nothing to do all day. However, this leaves 5,229,452,460 busy individuals managing a wide variety of tasks. Based on my knowledge of many of them (though not  the majority), this means that there are over 5 billion task management systems out there! Because every individual seems to manage their tasks differently. Furthermore, these task management...

Children ask the most amazing questions: “When lightning hits the sea, why don't all the fish die?”; “Do blind people see pictures when they dream?”; “Why are you sad, Mummy?”. Their questions are often thought-provoking and intimate. They are triggered by sincere curiosity. Their intention is inoffensive, they are short, sweet and, even if they’re not articulated perfectly, we understand them. Can we relearn the naïve art of asking straightforward, effective questions that provoke without...

Possible Postures for Managing Up Here’s some good news about diverse communication skills, applicable to any context: if you question professional people about this topic today, you’ll get some excellent answers – significantly better, I believe, than what you could have expected a generation ago. Somehow, something’s improving. As evidence of this, I cite a flash survey performed by my colleague, Suraj Ethirajan, as part of our preparation for a podcast on “managing up”. In brief, the...

It may seem, when searching for training solutions, that the options are either Do It Yourself, represented here as Bleriot crossing the Channel in his own machine, or a low-risk, catalog-based solution - the P&O Ferry. Mega exciting on the one hand , but will it get you to where you want to go? As predictable as the tides on the other, but can such a standardized package take you to the leading edge of the subject? Fortunately, there are alternatives. Training can be created using mature...

See also this video. Communication has special challenges when it comes to science and technology. Have you ever noticed that when you are burning to explain …when it seems really important to convince other people that you know what you’re talking about …then this is precisely when it’s hardest to have impact? Why?  It’s because the very thing that you want to share – your hard-won expertise – is actually an obstacle to communication. Your knowledge and technical instincts are like baggage...

If you are trying to solve tough problems at the moment, then be careful not to let your mind brood or worry. Brooding is where you get stuck in the past, ruminating, kicking yourself for not buying Zoom shares in January, for example. Worrying is letting fear take a hold, so that the future becomes a source of dread. In both cases, we would do well to remember Hamlet ‘s words: “nothing is ever good or bad, but thinking makes it so”. To do your best thinking and stay on track, consider taking...

Anita Roddick* once said: If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room The corona virus seems to have taken the place of the mosquito 😉 So, making a virtue out of different necessities, my colleagues and I delivered two half-remote training courses last week. One to EDA Solutions FAEs where, for (political) reasons that had nothing to do with the famous virus, one of the FAEs could not leave his country of origin to attend. Proud to be the...

At the start of a recent training course, each person introduced themselves by citing an animal that could do their job, then explaining why. One of the Field Application Engineers (FAEs) in the audience put forward a bee, saying that they buzzed around busily, collecting opportunities (pollen), working hard, doing great things for other people and generally being pretty amazing. Another FAE reminded us of the legendary observation that, at first glance, a bee’s job is almost impossible –...

Don't worry, this isn’t the old story about the insecure dyslexic, insomniac atheist who lays awake at night wondering if there really is a Dog. It's about the strange but ultimately effective path that my dog takes when I call him and why this could be a valuable reminder about goal setting. Toby, you see, does eventually come back, fulfilling his contractual obligations to his master and ensuring that he gets fed. At the same time, he thoroughly enjoys himself. The route he takes is always...

Apparently, I suffer from an affliction which most people manage to avoid. A weird mixture of intellectual laziness and hyperactivity, it once led me to attempt the reduction of German grammar to a handful of equations. Preferably to one equation. Einstein had managed it for physics, I reasoned … 😉 Self-deprecation notwithstanding, I'm still trying to simplify the world into something that I can understand/remember, and the above diagram is one result. I call the inner loop a Short-Circuit –...

Cycling quite fast down a narrow mountain road, I met a lorry coming up it. The result was eight broken ribs on one side, a broken shoulder on the other and a huge problem with getting out of bed. Problem-solving methodologies can be usefully classified as either Systemic or Analytical and this was a great occasion to try them both out. The first morning, desperate to get out of my hospital bed and service my needs, I wriggled, waved my legs in the air and groaned for over half an hour before...

Anna Karenina and Client Encounters All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. This, the first phrase of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, is remarkable for how it sticks in the memory. In complex relationships such as with families or clients, Tolstoy teaches us, there is one way to get it right and an almost infinite number of ways to go wrong. To be happy, a family needs security , physical comfort, time together, rituals, mutual consideration, and so on. All happy...

I recently setup a Best Practices Exchange (BPXchange) as an experiment in learning through sharing for busy Engineering Team Leaders working in different companies. The challenge was to find a format that would allow added-value exchanges in a reasonable time, taking into account the logistics of scheduling and hosting the virtual meeting, the selection of topics and the facilitation of the exchange. And we did it! The first BPXchanges worked like magic! So, if you’re interested in...

The rubber duck image is inspired by a software development "best practice" of sharing difficult problems with a rubber duck. The act of explaining brings clarity and so this technique accelerates software debug. It also follows that a rubber duck learns many best practices over the course of its career … I recently setup a Best Practices Exchange (BPXchange) as an experiment in learning through sharing for busy Engineering Team Leaders working in different companies. The I recently setup a...

Do, Doc, Done captures a way of working that is popular among support engineers and which often works well. For example : a case comes my way in the issue tracking system. I fix it (Do), send an email or write a comment when I close the case (Doc) and move on to something else (Done). There’s nothing wrong with this reactive process, but it can be even more powerful when a touch of proactivity is added, in the form of a Double-check. A recent...

A multi-million dollar chip production line is halted, but it's not clear where the problem is coming from. An independent consulting engineer is called in. She walks all around the production floor looking at the screens, the indicators, the dials, the cables, the mousetraps. She examines some log files and makes a Google search. Then she edits two lines in a particular configuration file, and all is well again. The plant manager is extremely happy until he receives her invoice: €10,000. He...

It's well known that many professionals have difficulty communicating with people outside their speciality and it's not unusual for start-ups to be frustrated by an indifferent world – "why does nobody appreciate our great idea??"! Ironically, this problem exists because we're intelligent. If we weren’t preoccupied by the complexity of our subject, then we'd get to the point more easily, our explanations would resonate with others and we'd grow in confidence and skill. As it is, we tie...

Consider what it takes to build an aircraft carrier and put it out to sea. Tens of thousands of contractors crossing multiple disciplines, organisations, states and countries are involved. Another ten thousand or so do the actual construction. About five thousand sailors then sail it out of port. Finally, a handful of pilots take to the sky. And so the ultimate success of seventy to eighty thousand people depends on these few pilots – the only ones to actually make contact with the...