What Designers Notice with Philippe Guichard

What do designers notice that other people miss? When Industrial Designer Philippe Guichard walks into a room, he isn’t looking at the paintings on the wall. He’s looking at the lights, the switches, the chairs, the proportions… In this excerpt from On Experience, we explore how years of experience reshape attention itself. Because expertise isn’t […]
Your Experience Has a Use-By Date with Mark Molony

A few days after my first conversation with mindfulness teacher Mark Molony, he contacted me with a simple message: “I’ve had some more thoughts.” That message captures something important about the purpose of On Experience. The most meaningful conversations do not end when the recording stops. They continue working on us. New ideas keep coming, distinctions get […]
Experience is Just a Memory with Mark Molony

We often talk about learning from experience. But what if experience isn’t what we think it is? In this excerpt from my On Experience conversation with mindfulness teacher Mark Molony, we explore a surprising idea: Perhaps we don’t carry our experiences forward at all. Perhaps we carry our memories of those experiences. And if memory is […]
What if Your Experience is Outdated With Mark Molony

You’ve spent years building your experience. But what if some of it is quietly becoming less useful? In this excerpt from my On Experience conversation with mindfulness teacher Mark Molony, we explore a question that many experienced professionals rarely ask: Could experience have a use-by date? As the pace of change accelerates, the challenge may not be […]
On Experience – Why This Conversation Exists

For most of my career, I’ve been wrestling with the same question: How do you turn what you know into something of value? And inside that, what allows one person to cut through and have a flourishing career while others with similar experience and expertise don’t? That’s been a personal challenge and a common conversation […]
When Experience Works Against You with Mark Molony

When Mark Molony walked into his first day as a social worker, he thought his training had prepared him for anything. Then a grieving widow said six words and every assumption he had fell apart. In this extract from our On Experience conversation, Mark, now a Mindfulness Teacher, exposes the insight that the most dangerous […]
Why Talking About Your Expertise Isn’t Enough

When you’ve spent years building experience, and you get to the point where working harder isn’t changing anything, you start to wonder if the issue is how you’re explaining what you do. You start thinking, maybe I just need to say this better. So you refine it. You simplify the language and try a few […]
Experience and the Space Before Reaction with Mark Molony

In this On Experience conversation, I speak with mindfulness teacher Mark Molony about experience, judgement, awareness, and the subtle ways expertise can both help us and mislead us. What began as a discussion about mindfulness gradually unfolded into something broader: How do we use experience without becoming trapped by it? Together, we explore: Practice Wisdom […]
Why Working Harder Isn’t Working

If you’ve spent years building experience, you may have been in this situation. You’re putting in the effort, you’re doing the work, and you’re showing up, delivering, thinking, refining. And yet… nothing really changes. At least, not in any meaningful way. ? At first, it’s easy to explain away. You tell yourself: “I just need to […]
Why Experience Can Stop You Seeing Clearly Michael Henderson

Recently, I recorded a conversation with Michael Henderson from Cultures At Work. Michael is a corporate anthropologist who has spent over 30 years observing how people work together. His work explores: How culture forms How behaviour patterns emerge And how organisations actually function beneath the surface. What drew me to this conversation with Michael […]