The new buzz-word is 'mindfulness'.  You might be forgiven for thinking this is some brand-new psychological construct, but it isn't – mindfulness is one of the central practices of Buddhism, and has been around for as long as people have asked the fundamental question of philosophy: 'what am I?'  As has so often happened, something profound and practical has been hijacked by psychobabblers, and has been completely misinterpreted along the way.

One of Cynthia's abiding interests is employee engagement, which HR people have long known is highly correlated with a variety of measures such as productivity, absenteeism, retention, and customer satisfaction.  Some excellent work has been done by organisations to lift employee engagement, which has resulted in improved organisational outcomes, but Cynthia noticed that this work was mostly organisationally driven. 

A recent TED talk by Kelly McGonigal was an opportunity to demonstrate that the earth is not after all flat.  It was an opportunity missed – instead the talk ended up merely adding to the accumulated misinformation about stress.

The research programme that underpins the Challenge of Change Resilience programme was based on the fundamental question in science – what's wrong?  We quickly discovered that in the context of stress and stress management, the answer is pretty well everything.  What's needed is a paradigm shift.   There was a time when people were convinced the earth was flat, and despite evidence to the contrary, the shift from a flat-earth to a round-earth paradigm took a long time.  So it would seem with stress management too: ideas like life-events as a cause of stress have been so endorsed by psychologists that people continue to think they're true.  The evidence tells you otherwise: for any so-called 'stressful job' there'll be people who enjoy it and don't find it at all stressful. 

Think how much more effective your company could be if you could identify the best potential candidates for leadership and then fast-track them with training to enhance their skills.  The question, of course, is what these skills might be.  What is it that makes an effective manager?  And are the required skills 'hard-wired', or can they be learned through appropriate training?  These may not be million-dollar questions, but they probably get fairly close to it!