ICONDA Blog

Suraj and I broadcast a podcast on Difficult Conversations a few days ago and we asked participants for ideas on best practices. “Focus on the problem” was suggested and the person who’d suggested this explained: when confronting someone , talk about the issue and...

My customer brings up supply chain issues again, just as they did last meeting and the one before, and for as long as I can remember now. As usual, this is done just when I’m getting to topics that are important to me and the question is accompanied by an agonized,...

If a conversation is a bridge and a particularly difficult part of that conversation a troll, then what does the troll represent? It is certainly NOT the person I am dealing with. Imagining my boss, my colleague, my customer or anyone else as a troll may be tempting...

Trolls are trouble when you want to cross a bridge. Especially when the bridge in question is slippery and swaying.  They can takes ages to deal with and, of course, trolls present a health and safety hazard. A Difficult Conversation is like crossing a troll bridge. ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...