Creativity is one of my favourite topics to talk about in a business environment.

I love it because it’s not just for artists and musicians. We are all creative and we were all the child who loved painting and colouring once, but many of us have forgotten how to engage with our creativity.

If we are all creative then we should bring our creativity into our lives, which means bringing it into our working lives too.

I’ve been thinking a lot about resilience over the last few weeks. I shared in my last newsletter about my failed business venture and there have been so many other times that I have experienced failure and disappointment and had to pick myself back up.

I’ve have worked in many teams during times of change where it’s been so clear that resilience is what that team really needs. I’ve often been asked ‘how do we build resilience in the team’?

I am a failure and I’m so proud of it!

I left university in 2001, fearless and determined to do something a bit different. Quite quickly I saw an opportunity and, along with a friend, we took on an empty shop unit. After some research and successful funding applications we started work on refitting the shop into a coffee shop. We worked part time jobs during the startup, eventually opening the shop in October 2002.

The reality of a diverse team is messy: Why we need to embrace conflict, discomfort and mess in order to see the benefits of diverse teams.

We are at the point now where most people agree that having a diverse team is an advantage. The data tells us that more diverse teams make better decisions and outperform less diverse teams and organisations. The avoidance of ‘group think’ is so crucial in both decision making and innovation that diversity has become an essential component for success rather than a ‘nice to have’. Yet there are still significant hurdles to overcome.