Sam Grayston

Category: Work/Life Balance

  • Rethinking Boundaries: Lessons from the Ashes 🏏

    Rethinking Boundaries: Lessons from the Ashes 🏏

    With the Ashes about to begin again, this time in Australia, I’ve found myself thinking about boundaries. Not just the rope around the edge of the cricket field, but the kind we’re encouraged to set in our personal and working lives.

    I loved the 2005 Ashes. I was utterly absorbed, listening to Test Match Special, watching as many deliveries as I could as England snatched that unforgettable victory from Australia. I remember one of my friends sharing his love for cricket by saying “It’s such an amazing game: you can play for five days and come out with a draw”.

    But as the Ashes has come around this time, the idea of boundaries has been playing on my mind in an unexpected way.

    Boundaries everywhere…except in cricket

    We’re encouraged, rightly, for the most part, to set clear personal boundaries which are healthy. Gen Z in particular is frequently praised for being better than previous generations at setting and holding them. When we understand what is acceptable to us and what is not, we create the conditions to flourish.

    Most sports reflect the same logic. Boundaries define the limits of play and help maintain control. Step outside the line in rugby, football, netball, basketball, or hockey, and play stops. The boundary represents the edge, or the point at which play halts and the boundary-crosser loses control.

    Cricket inverts this logic. 🏏

    In cricket, breaking the boundary is celebrated. If the ball reaches it along the ground, the batting side earns four runs; if it sails clean over, they earn six.

    The boundary isn’t a barrier…it’s a marker of success!

    Where most sports insist you stay within the lines to keep playing, cricket rewards you for going beyond them.

    A different kind of limit

    That swap feels worth exploring. It suggests that not all boundaries exist to constrain us. Some are meant to be crossed. Some show us what success looks like.

    Think of hierarchical boundaries, policy boundaries, cultural boundaries, or the quiet habitual boundaries we rarely question. Some are essential and protective. Others are flexible. Some are assumptions hiding as rules. And some, perhaps, sit far too close to us, defining a comfort zone we’ve mistaken for a limit.

    Cricket illustrates this beautifully. When a ball is clearly racing away towards the rope, commentators often say the fielders shouldn’t bother chasing. It’s gone too far. The runs are already earned. The boundary, in that moment, is not an obstacle but a signal of achievement.

    The long game

    I’m not advocating a Bazball approach to life – swinging wildly in every direction in the hope of racking up runs. Like Test cricket, life usually needs a blend of patience and ambition. Sometimes we play a defensive shot. Sometimes we take the single. And sometimes we take a lovely cover drive that carries us beyond the rope.

    In a Test match, the game unfolds over long periods of time, with momentum shifting subtly over hours or days. Success isn’t just about bold strikes, it’s about understanding the game’s rhythm.

    So perhaps the question isn’t: Should I have boundaries?

    But rather: What kind of boundary is this – and what is it for?

    Useful boundaries, debatable boundaries, and the ones worth playing with

    I know from experience that clear personal and professional boundaries support my wellbeing. They help me focus, recover, and make thoughtful choices.

    But it’s possibly true that some boundaries deserve scrutiny.

    Some are rigid and non-negotiable, some are assumptions we inherited, some mark the edges of our fears rather than our true limits.

    Some are there to protect us and some might just be pointing us towards what success could look like—if we dared to push further.

    A thought to take into the Series

    As we settle into another Ashes series of five days, five matches, and all the drama, there remains an intriguing paradox: Cricket is played within boundaries…yet it celebrates the moments when those boundaries are crossed.

    Perhaps the same is true in life? Not all lines are drawn to keep us in – sometimes they show us how far we can go.

    P.S. I’ve taken a different approach to writing this blog. I did lots of rambling into a voice note and refined it with an LLM. Then I’ve polished it and put my own ‘spin’ back on it. What do you think?

  • Stop the Arsonists: Better Leadership for Burning Workplaces

    Stop the Arsonists: Better Leadership for Burning Workplaces

    “I’m always firefighting. There’s no time to think.”

    I can’t remember the first time I heard this phrase, but I hear it A LOT – particularly when I’m coaching senior leaders in transformative and project leadership roles.

    And whilst evocative of modern time-management (or lack thereof) has to be a better way, right? Well this got me thinking, and a confluence of three things sparked this blog:

    1. Someone using this phrase in a coaching session…again!
    2. Reading about systems thinking.
    3. Watching the Apple TV+ show, Smoke.

    A bit of context about each, and then the thought…

    The phrase

    It paints a clear picture…or we can all think of the meme with the cartoon dog in the house that’s on fire saying ‘this is fine’…everything’s going a million miles per hour and we have to move from one crisis to the next, urgent to urgent to urgent – never doing the important things we promised ourselves we’d do, like strategic thinking, self-development, 1:1s with others, improving processes, etc.

    Systems Thinking

    This is something that I’ve dabbled with on and off for years. In the first instance, I didn’t really get it. Someone sent me a video of blobs moving around rectangles and said ‘I think you’re going to love it’…

    More recently, I’ve come to understand more about systems and how interconnected everything is – that is, whatever happens may be as of a result of something else far away in the system, or whatever we do may have far reaching and unintended consequences on the wider system. And that, traditionally, when things go wrong people tend to analyse; that is, break the problem down into smaller and smaller constituent parts – e.g. an app fails and analysis tells us a line of code needs rewriting, whereas Systems thinking asks us to synthesise, or to look up at the wider systemic nudges that may cause the problem – e.g. an app fails because of management pressure to ship fast on smaller budgets.

    Smoke

    This is a show on Apple tv+ about a fire scene investigator partnering up with a cop to identify and catch two serial arsonists. No spoilers, but it’s far more compelling than I thought it might be to start with. The fire scene investigator character, played by Taron Egerton, often delivers talks to trainees about the chaos of fire and being prepared.

    The confluence

    This got me thinking, if a fire kept happening in the same place, you wouldn’t want to keep relying on the fire brigade/department to come and put it out…you’d solve the reason why the same thing kept happening…so why don’t we do this at work when people describe their entire jobs as ‘fire fighting’?

    I can’t imagine a fire fighter loving having to revisit a scene time and time again if a fire keeps getting ignited there – they’d want to put some other measures in place – systemic changes – sprinklers, better equipment, arrest the arsonists, create escape plans.

    This approach could apply to the highly flammable systems in the workplace because it’s not ok to perpetually expect colleagues to be fire-fighters – presumably we want them spending their time adding value and putting their hard-won skills and experiences to work rather than rushing around, meeting to meeting, putting out things that have gone wrong.

    Setup Sprinklers

    In the immediate term, a knowledge-work equivalent of the sprinkler system might need setting up. If a fire keeps breaking out, having something to immediately dampen it down might be a reasonable temporary solution. In our imagined knowledge-work based equivalent, maybe that’s a standing meeting, decision forum, Andon Cord, or emergency WhatsApp channel that can be triggered straight away to solve the biggest crises and challenges.

    Improve Equipment and Systems

    The system is broken if fires keep breaking out. The system needs fixing. In the same way that if a restaurant kept catching fire they might need some better quality ovens, in our knowledge-work environment, we need higher quality systems that avoid these fires breaking out. Maybe it’s visualising all the work that’s going on so that people can see a potential fire brewing. Maybe it’s limiting work in progress so that more work can’t be shoved into an already overloaded system. Maybe it’s building in slack, recovery, creativity time into work.

    To continue the fire metaphor, sometimes a fire-break is required in order to break the spread of the chaos and put new systems in place and so it may be with our work systems. It’s not ok that colleagues describe their working days as perpetually being on fire, we have to find better systems.

    Arrest the Arsonists

    If you’re the fire fighter in this scenario, then I’m going to assume it’s not you lighting the fires…you keep putting them out. So who IS lighting them? Stop them. Take their jerry cans of fuel away.

    If it’s people adding stuff to your plate, check out the No Repertoire from Greg McKeown; if it’s people bringing you down, stop spending time with them; if people change their mind every five minutes, perhaps introduce something like the RAPID decision-making framework and force people to take some responsibility.

    Develop Escape Plans

    And, if it can’t be prevented, fire breaks out – then you need an escape plan. Getting away from your desk for a minute to assess the situation, having a friend to call, taking a holiday, going for a walk all may be release valves for dealing with these situations.

    There’s a reason firefighters have to have breaks and spend a lot of time training – it’s not tenable to be doing it all the time. And it isn’t for us either. We need breaks, we need training, we need recovery if we’re going to have to fight fires at work.

    These are some ideas I’ve been kicking around on firefighting. What other techniques could people try to change the system and stop the arsonists?

  • I had a dream… and now I have a published play!

    I had a dream… and now I have a published play!

    Get your copy here!

    A couple of years ago, I was running my theatre company’s writing group and I had to come up with something for a workshop we were running that week. I had no idea what do write – until I had a strange dream one night about being chased through a hotel lobby by a couple of goons in suits. That’s it!, I thought! That’ll be the scene…but, I continued, I’ll also acknowledge that it’s a dream. The character can ‘wake up’ at the end and stumble into reality…or another dream.

    It was a fun device and worked well for the workshop. So well in fact that I thought I should do more with it. I scrawled down some ideas from dreams and started to plot out some characters. I knew I had a couple of long flights ahead of me so, in a partial, dream-like state, I pounded out several thousand words of a play. Some scenes were dreams, some were ‘real’, some were short, others long. I was relatively pleased with it, so I took it along to the writing group for some feedback.

    “It doesn’t have a plot.”

    Yes. About that. Well, that was one of the sharpest pieces of feedback. But they were right. It was a collection of scenes that didn’t really go anywhere. So I made some choices about the arc of the play and the characters, did some heavy editing, and ended up with Polly’s Gone: a surreal, one-act drama.

    We previewed it through a script-in-hand ‘rehearsed reading’ and workshopped some more ideas before finally producing it for the Bristol One-Act Festival in 2024. We won a couple of acting awards, which was great for the company. I loved working with the team to bring this play to life.

    The play sparked lots of discussion from the audience: what was real or imagined, how did it end, what would happen next? And for a time, I did debate writing a part two or the second half of the play. In the end, I decided to leave it as a one-act. There’s no more to be said in this story.

    One of the things I love most about theatre is it’s transient nature. It comes and it goes. Unlike any other artwork, there is no artefact beyond the memories of the actors and audience (photos notwithstanding). And maybe it is getting older or something, but I wanted to have an artefact for this play – some sort of legacy, physical, thing – to hold in my hands and say ‘I made this’.

    So I’ve published my play.

    It’s available now on Amazon right now! And I’m very excited to have a physical copy in my hands! Kindle version available too.

    Get your copy here!

    If you want to know what the play is about, here’s the pitch:

    Ed has messed things up with Polly. He got swept away with a stupid idea that went wrong. Polly has just found out and she’s gone – left him.

    This is a play about a search for redemption.

    Ed is looking to put things right at the same time as being Best Man for his brother, Andy, who’s getting married to Polly’s best friend, Maisie.

    But here’s the thing: in every scene, the audience isn’t quite sure if Ed is awake and what we’re seeing is real, or if it’s a dream.

    In dream theory, the subconscious tries to deal with the challenges we hide from ourselves. Everything Ed is doing to put things right with Polly is actually to find forgiveness for himself.

    There is a wedding…and there is a redemption of sorts.

    Many, many thanks to my good friends who got involved in producing this play and for coming to see it and support our work. It means a great deal to me.

    And now I can say I’m a published author. What fun!

  • Does your canopy of work make sense?

    Does your canopy of work make sense?

    Another trip to Westonbirt Arboretum, another incredibly valuable lesson in the development of the Outcomes Tree. I was so enthused, I took a picture. Check out this beautiful Acer tree:

    Look at the gorgeous canopy, the perfection of the Japanese Maple leaves – extraordinarily satisfying, yes? Such perfection in nature! Look down the branches – layers of growth and life. Then to the trunk…hang on…there’s two trunks! Two trees! Living in perfect harmony with each other. Check those leaves again – oh yes, the ones on the right are slightly more mature, a reddening in the pigment compared to the ones on the left. Two lives, combined as one.

    Multiple Trees at Work

    In a recent Outcomes Tree workshop, someone asked me how it works if there are multiple trees in an organisation. This picture is, I think, a healthy metaphor for answering that question.

    Very often in organisations, there’s a lot of land-grabbing, empire-building, whatever you want to call it – it’s the equivalent of fighting for the sun at the expense of everything else around. It’s a desperate and limiting pursuit of power at the expense of others. It actually reduces the overall impact of the organisation, demoralises some and promotes others. What the Acers teach us is that, when we are working together, there’s space for both of us. See how each tree makes space for the other; how they flourish in their respective space and limit their overlap; and ultimately, how they appear united as one single canopy.

    When using multiple Outcomes Trees in an organisation, we need to look to see if the overall canopy makes sense.

    Do some outcomes cede way for others so there’s an overall, natural coherence beyond the individual pursuit?

    Where there’s space for our specialism, can we thrive and grow? Where there’s overlap, can we combine or cede growth for the benefit of the overall?

    I understand ceding looks like giving up something or giving it away but, you can see here, it’s natural for the benefit of the overall. There is room for all of us. There is abundance if we embrace it. Internal politics and aggression will be to any organisations detriment, not growth, and land-grabbing doesn’t help. Coherent, generous growth with an abundance mindset will endure.

    Mature leaves=mature leaders

    And what about the more mature leaves? What can they teach us? I believe they show us that in a healthy organisation, there are some experiments more advanced in their learning than others, and we can follow their lead; I also believe it shows us that the more mature people are in an organisation, the more willing they are to ‘go first’ and forge a bold, new set of outcomes for the future. The reddened leaves are going first to provide their energy back to the tree – and our leaders can do the same for our organisations.

    Dare you cede something for the benefit of the canopy?

    The impression from the outside of any organisation should be one, coherent experience (or canopy), even if, internally, it means we cede growth to others for the overall benefit of the customer or user experience.

    Does your canopy of work make sense? Is there too much overlap? Can you cede control over some things to promote growth overall?

    Watch the FREE Green Shoots introduction to the Outcomes Tree to get started growing your own!

  • Is there a Place for Seasonality at Work?

    Is there a Place for Seasonality at Work?

    One of my favourite places to walk is Westonbirt Arboretum near our home. It’s a great way to get back to nature and clear my head whilst supporting conservation work. On my most recent visit, I was marvelling at the structures of the trees now that all the leaves have fallen. These marvellous, decades-old organisms are saving all their energy and growth for spring: fresh buds, flowers, leaves, fruit. And it got me wondering if nature can teach us something about this time of year away from the pressures of ‘new year’s resolutions’ and towards embracing seasonality in our working lives?

    From the first of January, the start of the new calendar year, we’re often encouraged to set new goals and resolutions, and yet it’s a very arbitrary date. If we look to the rest of the natural world, it’s not starting afresh – it is midwinter! Plants are saving energy for fresh buds; animals are hibernating and hunkering down to be ready for spring; and here we are ‘getting after it’, ‘living our best life’, making radical changes…then not sticking with it, getting ill, and burning out. It doesn’t make much sense, it doesn’t appear to be very sustainable, and yet LinkedIn is full of people ‘bringing it on’ and ‘owning 2023’.

    We are connected to nature too – being human beings.

    Yes, reflect on the lessons of the previous season, nourish yourself with wholesome food, more knowledge, and enjoy movement; clear out unnecessary clutter and excesses of the past, but also be gentle, warm, kind and compassionate to yourself too. And when the first buds of new ideas and new goals arise, they will do so with greater clarity and fresh energy too.

    This is an invitation to not feel as great a pressure to set all those big goals and get started on everything now. Listen to yourself and to the natural world and respond appropriately. Reflect on what’s worked, what hasn’t; think about what you want to try out; maybe even explore a couple of ideas and experiments but consider that there may be a genuinely more invigorating time for renewal later.

    I am not saying do not do anything now.

    I know that life continues, that business thrives, that organisations endure. I’m merely advocating for observing more seasonality in our work and life – to acknowledge that there is ebb and flow, rather than being constantly ‘on’. For when we are ‘on’ 24/7, we run down to nothing and have nothing wonderful left to give the world. And I know that each and every person does have something extraordinary to offer.

    Personally, I’ve set goals for the next quarter and have a vision for the longer-term, but I’m not worrying about new year’s resolutions.

    And when you are ready to make the connections between those big, far-away goals and the experimental actions you want to start with today, then check out my Outcomes Tree idea. It’s an agile, responsive, and natural way to live in alignment with your purpose, bring value to your work, and change outcomes for the better.

  • The most stunning leadership statement I heard this year 

    The most stunning leadership statement I heard this year 

    Leadership is hard. In any organisation, at any level, being a leader requires clarity, calm and consideration. It requires people to paint such a compelling picture of a possible future that it seems like it could be a reality today. So much of the role of leaders is based on how they speak – and whether those words match their actions.

    I was wowed when I heard this statement from a leader’s opening remarks earlier this year. Rodrigo leads part of a large multi-national financial services provider. His words and actions impact work that serves millions of customers. He leads quarterly planning events that have thousands of attendees, and during his opening address, he said something that will stay with me forever:

    Your children know my name and I’ll have never met them. Your team members’ children know your name. What do you want them to say about you?”

    This was such an ingeniously human way of describing the impact leaders have, not just in the workplace, but in our lives more broadly. He knew that, whilst he won’t ever meet many of his team members’ children, they have probably heard his name at home. And he wants his people to talk about him positively to their children. By extension, he was making an extraordinary invitation to consider the impact his leaders have on their respective team members.  

    We can all think of leaders and managers we have talked about with disdain at home – to loved ones, friends, family (and children pick up on everything!). Those people close to us will have formed views and opinions of that leader and, potentially, by extension, that organisation. And because these people love us and want what’s best for us, their views will be strong-held based on what they hear. So, this wonderful statement was to ask us to consider how we’d like to be talked about when we’re not there. Do we want to be the leader that people are stressed and upset about and worry about interacting with, keeping people awake on a Sunday night; or do we want to be the leader that enthuses people to speak well about our organisation at home, to look forward to working with them, to bringing their best selves to work with us?

    As my coaching supervisor says to me, ‘how we do anything is how we do everything’and here’s a perfect example of how this can play out: our lives are complex webs of social interactions where each part of the system has an impact on the other.

    What kind of impact do you want to have on others?

  • What Can Yahoo! Teach Us About Presentee-ism?

    There has been a very positive shift in working culture over the past few years that has encouraged employees to work from home more often – living the flexible working mantra, and understanding that being in a physical office (or not) does not necessarily mean that you are at work (or not!). I take advantage of this enlightened approach and work from home often: the technology allows me to access everything exactly the same as in the physical office, and I am judged not on my attendance in the office, but what I achieve in my role. Great…I thought.

     

    I was a big fan of this approach. Recently, however, I’ve started to consider (or notice) if presenteeism (being at the office all the time) can in fact lead to better results. And the thing that made me consider this is Yahoo!

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  • The Seven Deadly Sins of Email: the abuses of electronic mail

    Imagine the scenario: it’s the 1960s and you’re a busy office worker. You’ve just finished up for your two-week summer holiday at Great Yarmouth, and you’re looking forward to riding the snails at the Pleasure Beach. When you return to work, you find over 200 memos in your intray.

    It wouldn’t happen…

    Jump forward to today…you return from your ten-day holiday on some Greek island to 200+ emails (or you might have even spent Sunday night going through them).

    How has this become acceptable?! How has email gone from a pretty geniune form of electronic correspondence to a catch-all pile of every type of information possible? And is it acceptable any more? I call on you all to repent for the seven deadly sins of email and live a virtuous, marvellous new world of email correspondance and make the best use of the other brilliant tools at our disposal for the other tasks that email has become.

    Here are, what I have deemed, the seven deadly sins of email (and what you can do about them):

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  • PIES at your meeting

    PIES. Yum. Who doesn’t like pie?

    Pie
    Pie

    But on this occasion, I’m not talking about a tasty pastry and meat/fruit filling, oh no. I’m talking about a method of co-operative learning developed by Dr Spencer Kagan and that I learned whilst I was teaching. I recently thought that this model might be really useful to apply to modern, grown up meetings too. It works like this:

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  • Work/Life Balance isn’t about the number of hours you work…

    Work/Life balance, right?
    Work/Life balance, right?

    Mon-Fri 9-5 sounds like a good work/life balance

    I have a confession to make…I don’t work ridiculous hours. However, I did make the mistake of inferring that, because most evenings and weekends were not at work, I had a great work/life balance. I did not. It turns out that the work/life balance split is not about hours worked, but about working on work and working on life…

    work_life_balance

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