I've spent the last few weeks getting a capital project moving again for a new client after it had been stalled for several months. I'm deliberately not going to go into the detail of the project itself because there are still some sensitive issues being worked through, but the experience has been a reminder of what I've seen repeatedly throughout my career: when a project gets into difficulty, the original plan is often no longer the thing that needs managing. In this case,

I've spent a lot of my career helping people solve problems, what's taken me longer to understand is that helping isn't always about having the answer. In fact, some of the most useful lessons I've learned about mentoring have come from getting it wrong. I first became a business owner at a pretty young age, by the time I was 17 I'd already had a go at market stalls, freelance contracting, building cybercafés and developing websites, at the age of 18 I bought out my father's

Introducing the idea through my lived experience Last week, I delivered a yacht from Walton-on-the-Naze (Essex) to Langstone Harbour (Portsmouth) as the delivery skipper alongside the new owner. It wasn’t a race or a leisure sail, it was a delivery… planned, structured, but still completely dependent on conditions that can change quickly (wind, tide, visibility, equipment performance), and judgement calls made in real time. What dawned on me wasn’t the technical challenge, bu