I grew up with a wood-burning stove in the living room. It did a fantastic job of generating heat in the winter, though it was less fantastic at distributing heat throughout the house, but that was not my problem to solve.
My problem was feeding it a steady stream of fuel, and thus much of my for...
Learning involves far more than just memorizing information.Â
Learning is a process of change and adaptation that involves integrating new information into our existing framework of knowledge in a way that changes how we make sense of the world.Â
Each little bit of learning changes how we perceiv...
Pat Murray, a legendary executive coach and CEO group chair, defined a “real issue” as...
“any issue that causes everyone in the group to experience high levels of anxiety even when thinking about the issue, much less talking about it.”
Martha and I were fortunate to meet Murray and learn from hi...
At your next all-hands meeting, look to your left, then look to your right. Odds are one of those people is either actively looking for a new job, or at least watching for new opportunities.
One of the two people sitting next to you would also report that they experienced stress “a lot of the day...
The very peaceful-looking creature in the photo above is an agouti. About the size of a cat, an agouti looks kind of like a mini-capybara, to which they are related, although they are closer cousins to guinea pigs.
Panamanians call them ñeque ("nyeck-ay"), and you can spot them walking delicately...
Engineering school, plus a few decades in the medical device industry, has given me ample reason to spend lots of time thinking about accuracy and precision.
Most of us will, at some point in our lives, find ourselves on the receiving end of one of those medical devices. When we do, we want to fe...
Successful photography demands constant attention to tradeoffs and compromises. My preferred subjects are birds, and they rarely agree to pose patiently in the perfect light of a studio.
A bird photographer, therefore, must do the best they can with the conditions they get. This means there are n...
Did you know that every September, many birds transform themselves into completely different species?
Redstarts metamorphose into robins, summer tanagers into sapsuckers.
Others simply vanish. But where to they go?
In Part One of this series on conflict, we looked at what we do that turns a difference of opinion into the sort of toxic confrontations we all dread, the ones that get us nowhere, and leave us stressed out and depleted in the process.
The “what” is our tendency toward destructive responses like ...
We’re talking about conflict.
Last time we looked at the origin of the word itself. Conflict is literally about bashing things together.
The word carries a connotation of forcefulness or violence. It feels threatening, and that feeling offers an important clue as to why we don’t like it, and why ...
To bash together.
That is the literal meaning of the word “conflict,” from the Latin com- or con-, for “with or together” and fligere, meaning “to strike / bash.”
What gets bashed together can be our physical bodies—the original sense of the word—but in the workplace it’s more often ideas, opinio...
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Last week we introduced Patient SM. If you missed it, start here.
By age four, a rare genetic disorder called Urbach-Wiethe disease had completely destroyed SM’s amygdala, rendering her unable to experience fear.
A life without fear might initially sound enviable. Yet, we lea...
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