I believe almost everyone knows that story that if you put a frog in hot water, it will jump out, but if you put it in cold water and start slowly boiling it, eventually you will boil a frog. Subtle changes slight inconvenience, acceptable discomfort… and a frog is boiled dead. But even without going into fatalistic mode, small soft steps are efficient if you need to deal with any opposition.
Long time ago I had the “conflict” with my mother over a car. Continue reading How to boil a frog?
We are drowning in information. It comes to us from all possible sides. However, only a little fraction of it is useful and even smaller – truly actionable.
One of these days I was driving to Antwerp and saw a traffic information board, providing:
Well, thank you very much, but what the hell am I supposed to make out of it?! Continue reading Providing actionable information
In 2010 my future husband and myself were working on a project in South Africa. After the project was completed we seized the moment and travelled along the Garden Route from Cape Town to Port Elisabeth. Our final eastward destination was the Ado Elephant park – an amazing safari place, where one can see wildlife in all its beauty. As the name has it, there are a lot of elephants there.
I recall our first photo of an elephant Continue reading The elephant effect: the tenth one is not a dime less spectacular than the first one
In a lot of major corporations the CEO and the President of the Board of Directors are not allowed to travel together. The same applies to the President and the Vice President of a country.
But what about families?
This was the question we were discussing with my husband while driving home after dropping kids at their grandparents. Freeway; driving 130 kms (±80 miles) per hour; cars passing each other…
Continue reading If you die tomorrow, where’s your contingency plan?
Have you ever seen someone passionately solving a problem that doesn’t really need to be solved in the first place?
Problems. We all have them. Some of them we are given, some others we take ourselves. There are also frequently problems which we invent ourselves. Finally, another category is problems we didn’t quite understand. The latter is an important one. Basically, what happens? We jump to searching for solutions, or even to actually investing our efforts in trying to solve a problem, while it could be that the problem has another facet. It could be that we can actually solve another problem — easier or more pleasant to solve — and the initial one just vanishes by itself.
Ok, before it gets too complicated, let me give you an example. Continue reading Problem-solving basics: Are you sure you are solving the right problem?
Family Life CEO 