It sometimes seems inevitable that life and work are too full of information and distractions to allow us to properly experience anything, still less think carefully or productively about it. This is persuasive, but not true: in the workplace and our lives more broadly we can reclaim our attention, and use it to unlock problems that seem difficult and opportunities that seem unattainable. 

In this workshop we will look at what attention is and how it gets taken from us, and set out practical means of restoring it. Using writing exercises that strengthen our muscles of observation and curiosity, we will show that a mode of thoughtful attention is likely to be more conducive to creativity and productivity than a state of frenetic and anxious activity. In so doing, we will bring out the value of attention, and the benefits for our work and our lives of routinely attending more consciously to the world. 

Work should be a great place to be imaginative: precisely because it creates so many complex challenges for individuals, teams and organizations, it ought to be fertile ground for conceiving and nurturing new ways of thinking and doing. But those same individuals, teams and organizations, caught in the slipstream of daily demands and well-rehearsed habits, can often find that working life is more liable to block imaginative thinking than to encourage it.

This workshop will examine what hinders and helps imagination in the workplace. What gets in the way, and what ruts can we find ourselves in? How do we create the space and time to step outside the day-to-day? How do we encourage ideas and fresh thinking?

Using writing exercises, in which participants will be asked to carve paths out of tricky fictional predicaments, we will show how imagining other minds and worlds can help us become more flexible, thoughtful and innovative in our own.

Most work involves enterprise of some kind, and enterprise necessarily involves risk. Most organisations now consider risk in a more or less systematic way, but few think about or address how risk operates at an individual level: we as employees or workers have decisions to make all the time about how much to extend ourselves, which opportunities to take and which to leave alone, how a particular course of action will affect our team or our organisation - in an economic environment where enterprise and associated risk often lead to positive outcomes and reward. Managing this risk/return becomes our own business, but we’re left to do so without frameworks or guidance.

This workshop takes the time to consider these questions in a structured way. What happens when we take on risk on behalf of our organisation? What are the psychological impulses and likely effects? And can we become more conscious and secure risk-takers in our own professional lives?

We spend more time with our colleagues than with anyone else, and when those relationships are healthy, life at work tends to flow towards productivity and satisfaction; when they’re bad, at best little gets done, and the enjoyment quickly goes from our working lives. We know all this, and yet we seldom consciously consider our relationships at work with the same care and attention we might bring to our relationships outside.

This workshop addresses relationships in the workplace: what’s in place when they’re going well, what can cause them to deteriorate, and what we can do to optimise them.

When work is good, it can engage us fully - drawing on our talents, stretching our capabilities and making us effective in the world. The line between absorbing/satisfying and consuming/debilitating can be a fine one, however: wanting to do a good job tips into perfectionism, and carrying responsibility can shade into feeling indispensable. Life outside work tends to suffer, and performance at work can quickly follow. We’re told that balance is the key, and it may be, but as a practical prescription that tends not to be helpful.

This workshop explores the feelings that govern our performance at work and our experience of it, and suggests ways of seeing and being that can help to direct emotion positively and sustainably.