Baroness Susan Greenfield, renowned British scientist and broadcaster, will be a keynote speaker at Australia’s cutting edge Creative Innovation Conference in Melbourne this week. According to the Weekend Australian, the baroness has come to Australia especially for the conference, in partnership with Melbourne University’s…

Our Managing Director and Chief Psychologist, Stephen Kohl, believes that since the Global Financial Crisis, people have been demanding more genuine engagement and service in business.

In the boom climate prior to late 2009, companies and organisations were prepared to spend much more on out-sourced services like recruitment, training, conferences and “extras”. Following the GFC, things have been leaner and…

Here’s the good news:

Every organisation or individual can achieve a high rating on Google and the other search engines.

Here’s the other news:

You’ve got to be a good writer and like people, language and communication. You’ve got to work intelligently and…

Every 4 years, the Olympic Games bring sport into sharp focus across the world, and in most ways the Games are the highest expression of human sporting prowess and endeavour that we have.

Why do we participate in and honour sport so much, and what does it teach us about the rest of life and work?

The Olympic Games are a celebration of being human. They symbolise and encapsulate competition and…

Innovation and Creativity articles dominate the July issue of HR Monthly, the official magazine of AHRI, Australia’s peak Human Resources body.

Like businesses and organisations the world over, who are increasingly recognising that innovation and…

Human beings belong to a gregarious species. We live in groups, we organise ourselves in communities, we develop language, rules and technology to communicate with each other, and usually, we work in teams.

In short, we engage with each other and with our environment. Our engagement keeps us safe and happy. By co-operating together, in every form of work and endeavour, we support each other, harness the power of multiple skills, talents and intellectual points of view, and we create…

I’ve noticed, as I go around talking to organisations about diagnosing, understanding and harnessing their creativity to improve their business practices, that there is one crucial ingredient of creativity that most people don’t know about. This makes me think that idea Incubation might be the secret ingredient of innovation and problem solving.

Some people, like Steve Jobs, know the secret automatically, but…

Since ancient times, when Know Thyself was inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, people have known that it is important to understand as much as we can about ourselves.  For years, philosophers, psychologists and ordinary people have asked themselves, “Who am I?”

It’s an important…

When I was a child growing up in the middle suburbs of Sydney, every household seemed to religiously read The Australian Women's Weekly. It was a cultural and social mainstay: both a barometer and a bible.

One of the main things I learned from the Women’s Weekly is to play to your strengths. Over and over again, and in…

St. Nicholas is Santa’s real name. St. Nicholas, who was a 4^th Century bishop in Turkey, is patron saint of children, sailors, bakers, pawn-brokers and Russia, among other things. We have been celebrating St. Nicholas Day, which falls on 6^th December, for many years, and its become a tradition among our family and friends to meet every year on St. Nicholas Day to mark the beginning of the Christmas…

The innaugural Creative Innovation Conference was described last year by Micenet Australia Magazine as “The Best Conference Ever”. Last week I, and two of my associates, attended Creative Innovation 2011 and I can un-ashamedly say that it was indeed the best conference ever.

Creative Innovation 2011 brought…

In 2010, IBM published the Global Survey of CEOs 2010 and found that,

“More than rigour, management, discipline, integrity or even vision – successfully navigating an increasingly complex world will require creativity”.

 IBM and the more than 1500 CEOs they interviewed from 60 different countries are not alone in this view. Ernst & Young in their Connecting Innovation to Profit Report, 2010 said,

“ The ability to manage,…

A conversation about questionable psych tests with the delightful Nicole Underwood, Adelaide recruiter extraordinaire, and HR Daily Community Blogger yesterday, inspired me to re-visit this post, which I thought I'd share here:

In the novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany by Amercian novelist John Irving, famous for writing The World According to Garp, the central character Owen Meany spends his whole life preparing for one…

Original thinkers who drive innovation, adaptability and problem solving are highly valuable and sought-after, so if organisations were able to identify and encourage original thinkers they would have a huge advantage in the marketplace.

Can you spot an original thinker? Dr. Mark Batey, of Manchester University’s Manchester Business School, believes you can.

In a recently produced MBS…

For all our recruitment tests and practices in HR, the problem of psychopaths in the workplace remains a problem that’s hard to solve.

Everyone has worked with a psychopath. I’m a lay-person, so I use the term in it’s popular sense, but I’m on their case because they're so disruptive. Sometimes they are the obvious bullies in the office,…

There has been an interesting discussion lately on a Psychometrics Linked In Group. The discussion was begun by Prue Laurence, Director at Psylutions, a workplace psychology consultancy in Melbourne where they are currently conducting a survey about cheating in workplace psychometric tests and people’s attitudes to psych testing.

Cheating on psych tests is a subject that…

I planted an olive grove for my old age. I imagined friends and family gathering under the dense shade of the silver trees, sitting at antique wooden trestle tables spread with white tablecloths and wine and cheese, as we watched children play on rugs laid under the trees and run through the gnarled trunks, playing hide and seek and discovering secret worlds.

But, despite the Mediterranean climate of South Australia, where I planted my little olive grove in the garden of our…

I’m getting a bit sick of hearing people talking about cheating on psych tests. All over the internet, from chat rooms to websites to blogs and legitimate news and journal articles, people are sharing stories about how they have “cleverly” worked out that they can cheat on personality tests.

Well “duh”! Most people these days have a pretty good general idea of pop psychology, and what it means in general to be an “extrovert” and an “introvert”. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t…