Billy Walsh – Fighting for Success

I have selected 3 sound bytes from my conversation with Billy Walsh that I felt were worth highlighting.

With the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in the news all the time I looked around for some books in the area, ideally one that was full of doom and gloom. 

Hayhoe is regarded as one of the best communicators in the area of climate change and her book is one full of facts but also hope and optimism. 

But facts are only one part of the argument and she outlines how changing hearts and minds in communities from the ground up is the way forward – a great read. 

Fun video and article detailing the new ‘sport’ of keeping a balloon in the air – you have to watch the video to see how a seemingly childish activity could become a legitimate source of sporting entertainment and has turned into an international sport with its own World Cup. It’s brilliant – oh to be young again!

Sometimes it’s the obvious things that we miss or maybe it’s because we have heard them too much and it’s become old news.  This article caught my eye as it’s about the subject of personality and team building.

We tend to have moved on from this basic premise to look for more sophisticated ways of building culture and refining leadership, but this is a useful reminder of how personality impacts team dynamics and is a core part of inter-personal relationships. The writer talks of 4 personality types based on the DISC assessment and how they impact team dynamics.

I’ve worked with people who have near-photographic memories and it’s one of the few things I would envy.  The ability of our memories impacts so much that we do each day. 

We tend to think of this as something we are born with or at least something we can’t move the dial on that much, so this article was interesting as it breaks down the forgetting curve (yes there is such a thing).

This stated that we halve our memory of new knowledge in a matter of days or weeks, unless we make a conscious effort to review the newly learned material. The article outlines some useful ways we can go about reducing our forgetting rate.

Cognitive biases influence how we think and can lead to errors in decisions and judgments. This isn’t an article per se but an interactive site that is probably the best I’ve seen outlining cognitive biases. 

If we are aware of this area of decision-making it can have multiple benefits especially in the area of people-judgment and quite often it’s a core part of our work. Once we recognise them we can counteract them and understand how they affect our decision-making.