Helping individuals and organisations make wiser choices in a mad world.

Have you ever found yourself doing exactly the opposite of what you promised yourself you’d do? Or sabotaging your own chances of success in a job or in a relationship? Or noticing patterns of behaviour which move you further away from your goals? It might seem that it’s someone else’s fault, but more likely it’s to do with your own self-defeating behaviours.

The Athenian philosopher Plato (427–347 BCE) famously characterised the process of decision-making as being like a charioteer in charge of two horses. One is steady and true and the other is unruly and impulsive. To effectively steer your mind, he wrote, you need to focus on reason and avoid the unruliness of emotion.

Sitting in peak hour traffic on the Monash Freeway this morning I noticed something that had been obvious all along, and yet no less impressive. All the trucks and vans and utes and cars streaming towards the city reminded me of blood platelets in an artery. Each one signifying a business with customers, capital, people, innovation, and productive energy. Far from being frustrated in traffic I found myself marvelling at the lifeblood of a nation flowing all around me.

I am sitting on a massive shard of limestone rock jutting out over the valley 300 metres below. It is 12 February 2012, and we have walked the pilgrim’s trail to the top of Vulture’s Peak near the city of Rajgir in North East India.

In this era of stupidity and ignorance how do we know what wisdom is? I've spent quite a bit of time researching (and experiencing) this question, and I see wisdom as a way of understanding the world.

Andy was a vagrant. He would sit on a park bench right on the waterfront of our Sydney harbourside suburb from sunrise to sunset, gazing out across White Bay towards Balmain. He wore the same clothes every day. He never showered, and he reeked as he passed by, tottering unevenly. He must have been aged only in his mid to late 30s.

All civilisations rise and fall. Yet, at any point in time the fabric of daily life appears stable and unchanging. The human mind is not equipped to perceive incremental change. I believe there is a change of empire going on at this present stage of our history.

How do you make a decision when you can't get enough information and the issues are outside your experience? System 3 Thinking is a distinct level beyond Daniel Kahnemanʼs System 1 (fast, intuitive) and System 2 (slow, rational), designed for navigating situations of doubt, dilemma, or disruption.

My father had an expression: "if you can stand tippy-toe longer than anyone else you'll be successful!" What did he mean? He was talking about self-discipline and perseverance in an imagined competition where the one who stands tippy-toe the longest wins. This advice seems a bit out of date (my father is 97).

Wisdom has been my theme for over 20 years, but I've been losing my mind over American politics lately and the profound impacts on the rest of the world. It's like watching the 2006 film "Idiocracy" in real time!

Everything I know at the peak of my career I learned at the bottom! I had made a mistake, a big, huge mistake. It was the early hours of Valentine’s Day, 14th February 2014. I was sitting up with my wife, and tearfully admitting that the 2-year consulting partnership with my colleague had been a failure. It was probably an unwise decision to go into the partnership in the first place.

Mindset isn’t just in your head — it’s in your biology! At the Integria Flourishing Symposium in Brisbane 16-17 August, I was reminded of Alia Crum’s fascinating research at Stanford.

Change is hard. What makes it harder? Trying to suppress emotions instead of working with them

In December 2017, I was in Khartoum delivering a leadership program for senior directors of the Central Bank of Sudan. My session was on coaching for wise decision-making. Early in the workshop, the group challenged me: “We expect the Qur’an to teach us what wisdom is. We don’t need this.” I explained how wisdom is central to all faiths, and they could not deny the complex problems of the 21st century often require a third system of thinking.

Some years ago when I experienced the pain of grief I thought it would be better to die. I felt so utterly alone and abandoned, drowning in shame and self-loathing. Yet, in that moment of desperation I reached out for a higher perspective on my suffering. Not a spiritual perspective exactly. More a way of seeing and understanding the context of what I was enduring.

When you're in the middle of it, life always seems as though it will go on the same way forever. Of course, I understand intellectually that "all things must pass" as the philosopher/musician George Harrison famously sang. But life changes so incrementally that it's hard to notice - until change is unmistakable.

Like many, I'm outraged at the signs of blatant authoritarianism arising in the USA and elsewhere. It feels like a battle between the forces of democracy and the forces of dictatorship. Yet, this duality hides a fact of life: politics - of any persuasion - is actually less about the national interest, the common good, or the general welfare, and more about individuals who are motivated to do what is good for them, not what is good for others.

In the afternoon of 27 April 1977, we were all called to an impromptu townhall meeting in the Perth offices of Agnew Mining Company. I was the Personnel Research Officer, hired five months earlier by the CEO, Barry.

As an organisational psychologist and executive coach I'm often called in to help individuals manage workplace politics. Often it's about friction from within the team, sometimes involving outright bullying. At other times it's about "stakeholder management" and how to use influence to get people to do what you need them to do.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. George Orwell showed remarkable prescience in his dystopian book 1984 (written in 1948): ‘Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.’

Everyone is biased, except me! Cognitive biases do save your brain time and energy through mental shortcuts. But they are just tools: useful in the right contexts, but harmful in others.

Hollywood may have terrorised us about alien invasions, but the aliens are already here and living amongst us! AI is actually 'Alien Intelligence' according to Jewish historian, Yuval Noah Harari in his 2024 book, Nexus.

For some time now I've been helping individuals and teams make wiser choices in a mad world. But it's getting harder. And the world is getting madder.