Looking to Improve Employee Engagement? Keynotes and Seminars That Will Help

I'm delighted to announce that Sculpture Consulting (my Company) and Delta 7 (the best strategic artists in the business) have teamed up to offer a number of talks/keynotes and seminars for 2012.

If you are looking for some inspiration, challenge, or to raise employee engagement levels in your organisation please get in touch.  Our style is interactive, humorous, very visual and we promise that death by powerpoint is not an option!

Here are a selections of the topics available:

• Creating instant rapport through the use of strategic art.
• Relationship Management – how knowing your personal style can improve your effectiveness. 
• Developing Trust – how little steps  can create big opportunities 
• Is Business Process Outsourcing good for your organisation, your people, your IT department or consultants selling solutions?
• HRBPO - are we kidding ourselves? 
• Presentation techniques  - back to the future - making your presentation work for your audience  
• 10 myths about the brain and their impact on the workplace 
• Applying psychology to the workplace – from group size to personal traits , how understanding how we tick makes business sense. 
• The Secret of success in business – how enthusiasm can be developed and applied to your organisation 
• Time Travel Strategy - how organisations can create their future history 
• Putting Business into Social Media  - shifting the paradigm for business professionals 
• 3 Steps to Employee Engagement

If you would be interested in a discussion about how we might be able to help you please call Scott on +447807 646 508 or email scott@sculptureconsulting.com

Transformative HR - Evidence Based Change

Transformative HR by John Boudreau and Ravin Jesuthasan , shows how some organisations are redefining HR leadership by using evidence–based change to optimise efficiency, effectiveness, and strategic impact. They present a fascinating view on the impact of "mental models" on how HR's positioning. The authors go on to claim that there are five principles to the "new HR decision science":

Logic–driven analytics, segmentation, risk leverage, synergy and integration and optimization.

At this point that I have to press the pause button.  What on earth does all that mean? 

The authors go into each of the 5 principles and describe what they mean and how to implement them.  The problem I have is  - why on earth do such clearly intelligent HR thinkers have to resort to such horrid language and expect the reader to possess translation software to understand their point?  I worry that the "mental model" being taken here is academically focused -  this is fine but it also feels like it is attempting to give HR practitioners a new language that can can be used to impress their organisations and colleagues.  The fact is – the more someone understand something the simpler the language they are able to use to describe it.  In this context at least, I’m afraid the book fails to demonstrate much true understanding.

All-in-all I feel a little frustrated by this book, especially as it had some very useful ideas and interesting in–depth case studies of companies such as Coca–Cola, IBM, Royal Bank of Canada and Royal Bank of Scotland.

Come on chaps let’s have a shorter, clearer, follow up – we really are interested in your thoughts.

The Joy of Statistics - Hans Rosling's Brilliant Approach

I love how simple this video presentation is particularly like how Han's natural enthusiasm helps to make, what is obviously, a very complex story very engaging.  Makes you wish your maths teachers could have been like Hans doesn't it?

Source:  BBC

The Lies We Tell Ourselves - About the Brain - 1

At a recent lecture given by Jack Cohen , co-author of The Science of Discworld with Terry Pratchett and Ian Stewart.  I was inspired by their notion of "the lies we tell children". They provide the following definition:

A lie-to-children is a statement that is false, but which nevertheless leads the child's mind towards a more accurate explanation, one that the child will only be able to appreciate if it has been primed with the lie

The authors acknowledge that some people might dispute the applicability of the term lie, while defending it on the grounds that

...it is for the best possible reasons, but it is still a lie... 

This lead me to think about what we tell ourselves lies about with regards to how the brain works.  The brain is very complex, and understanding how it works informs how we lead, manage and participate in the world.  This series of posts attempts to tease out the truth behind some of the more colourful notions about “brain science”.

Number 1: We only use 10 percent of our brains

This one sounds so compelling—a precise number, repeated in pop culture for a century, implying that we have huge reserves of untapped mental powers. 

But the supposedly unused 90 percent of the brain is not some vestigial appendix. Brains are expensive—it takes a lot of energy to build brains during foetal and childhood development and maintain them in adults. Evolutionarily, it would make no sense to carry around surplus brain tissue. 

Experiments using PET or fMRI scans show that much of the brain is engaged even during simple tasks, and injury to even a small bit of brain can have profound consequences for language, sensory perception, movement or emotion.

True, we have some brain reserves. Post Mortem studies show that many people have physical signs of Alzheimer’s disease (such as amyloid plaques among neurons) in their brains even though they were not impaired. Apparently we can lose some brain tissue and still function pretty well. And people score higher on IQ tests if they’re highly motivated, suggesting that we don’t always exercise our minds at 100 percent capacity.

So we use most of our brains much of the time and we know that exercising it is a good thing.  Next we consider our "flashbulb memories".

Source: The Smithonian