14. No Fear, No Filter: Building a Team That Tells You the Truth
A Curious Space: Psychological Safety Season finale In this episode, Kate and Maddie explore psychological safety: what it actually means, why most people get it wrong, and the specific leadership behaviours that create it. Drawing on Amy Edmondson's book The Fearless Organisation, they make the cas...
13. Culture Room 101: Four Things We're Banishing From Workplace Culture
Culture Room 101: Four Things We're Banishing From Workplace Culture Episode Summary In this bridge episode between seasons, Kate and Maddie borrow the format from the BBC show Room 101 (itself borrowed from Orwell's 1984) to make the case for banishing pieces of organisational culture orthodoxy for...
12. Culture Clinic: The One Person You Can't Afford to Lose
In this episode of A Curious Space, Kate and Maddy open up the Culture Clinic for the first time, responding to a letter from a listener we are calling Rowan. Rowan runs a business where two years of deliberate culture-building is being undermined by one person: a commercial director who brings in m...
11. Time to Think: How to help your team do deeper, better thinking
Throughout season one of A Curious Space, one name kept coming up: Nancy Kline. Whether we were talking about culture, trust, conflict or storytelling, her framework, the Thinking Environment, kept appearing in the background. So in this post-season deep dive, we decided to give it the conversation ...
10. Culture Under Pressure
Season one comes to a close with perhaps the most timely question we have explored this series: what actually happens to organisations when the pressure is on? In this episode, Kate Nicholroy and Maddie Fox look at the research behind threat rigidity, a well-documented pattern where individuals and ...
9. Why You Can't Install Culture
Kate Nicholroy and Maddie Fox dig into one of the most persistent frustrations in organisational life: why culture change programmes so often fail to deliver, and what leaders can do differently. They explore the gap between change as an event and transition as an internal process, why the leadershi...
8. Subcultures: The Good, The Bad, And The WhatsApp Group You're Not In
Not One Weather System: Why Your Organisation Has Many Cultures, and What to Do About It If you have ever moved between departments and felt like you had walked into a completely different organisation, this episode is for you. This week, Kate and Maddie are exploring organisational subcultures: wha...
7. Conflict at Work: Good Fights, Bad Fights, and the Ones You're Taking Offline
Conflict is not the problem. Avoiding it is. In this episode, Kate and Maddie get into one of the most misunderstood dynamics in workplace culture: conflict. Not the dramatic kind, but the everyday kind. The disagreement that goes unspoken in a meeting. The tension that surfaces as gossip rather tha...
6. Trust Falls and Other Workplace Injuries (How to build, break and repair trust at work)
Trust is one of those words that gets used a lot in organisations and examined rarely. In this episode, Kate and Maddie get into what trust actually means in the context of teams, why low trust is so costly, and what you can do to build and repair it in practice.They explore a framework for understa...