It’s mental health awareness week, so I thought I’d share the thing I’m doing that is having the most positive impact on my mental health at the moment, and it’s probably not what you think….

I often hear that we can’t redesign our services as we don’t have the time or budget. But often, creating more human-centred experienced doesn’t have to cost money and a few simple tweaks can significantly change things for your clients.

Part five in the series to look at how to take a more human approach to strategy development. Having done the empathy research, it’s now time to mine this for insight and structure in a way that others want to create change.

Part four in the series to look at how to take a more human approach to strategy development. Here we focus on empathy interviews and the tips and tricks to doing them well.

Part three in the series to look at how to take a more human approach to strategy development. Here we focus on devising the plan including understanding context, stakeholders, timing and messaging.

Part two in the series on how to take a more human-centred approach to strategy development. Focusing on dropping the lingo, be clear on the why and start small.

Part one of a series of posts that will outline how to take a human-centred approach to strategy development.

I was recently interviewed for the Institue of Directors Boardroom Magazine about the strange post-it note that has sat on my desk for the last 3 years.

Often when I meet a client for the first time, they ask me what Mulberry St is named after. Recently that has been a more controversial answer than it once was. A story in having the uncomfortable conversations to do better.

We don’t often take the time to stop and look back as to what has worked and hasn’t worked in our business. Recently I was asked to speak with someone looking to start their own business and it made me reflect on what I wish I knew three years ago when Mulberry St was taking shape.

Lockdown is hard. Lockdown with kids is hard. Lockdown with a child with a broken leg…. well this requires a lot of patience and a lot of wine. But, for me this time around, lockdown was also an experiment in pressing pause and so far the experiment is paying off.

We’ve all worked for organisations where the purpose statement was purely for a poster on the wall and not infused into how the company operated and the decisions being made. Is there another way and does this matter. Yes and absolutely!

I am making the next terrifying step by launching Mulberry St. Launching a brand rather than continuing to operate as ‘Clare Swallow’ feels big, but weirdly personal at the same time. Deciding on a brand when, at this stage, it’s just you – even worse! But then I thought F*#k it! 2020 has been all types of crazy already, so I am choosing to prioritise progress over perfection.

The downside (if there is one) to having an aligned, passionate and ‘mission-driven’ team however that when you need to reshape and, at times, reduce that team to stay future fit, it can feel like you are messing with the very core of what the organisation stands for. We helped reset and realign this team using the emotional culture deck in a period of change.

Words are just words until we add the context, and it’s in that shared context that the true insight lives. An important lesson around the meaning of Joy.

Having put the yellow carpet away on the Young Innovator Awards for another year, here are the lesson’s that our young people can teach us about innovation.

Emotions and the workplace have not traditionally been the best of friends. But we all have them, and not surprisingly they are key input into how we feel, think, act and perform at work. I’m hoping this wee box of empathy can help bring these two worlds together.

Recently I opened a new bank account. This experience was the perfect example of how the intersections of organisations (the space between the silos where one department's responsibility stops and another departments starts) can lead to a terrible experience for the customer.

The lesson’s I learned from my time running a high growth,successful tech consultacny and why I ultimately chose to leave the job I loved.