A Curious Space: Leadership, Culture and Teams

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 case that psychological safety is not about comfort, being nice, or avoiding conflict. It is the belief...

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 good. One host argues for getting rid of something, the other plays devil's advocate, and together...

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 more revenue than anyone else and makes working life harder for almost everyone around them.   The qu...

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 it has always deserved. This episode is a proper exploration of Kline's work: where it comes from, w...

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 systems under stress narrow their thinking, restrict communication, and default to familiar behaviou...

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 leadership team is always further ahead than the people hearing the news, and why culture does not live 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: what they are, why they form, how they can help or hinder the change you are trying to make, and why un...

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 than conversation. The team that looks cohesive on the surface but is quietly stuck. They explore how w...

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 understanding trust not as a single thing but as a set of distinct components, and why that distinction mat...

In this episode, Kate and Maddie dive into belonging: why it matters so much to individuals and organisations, what it actually looks and feels like in practice, and how you can start building it in your team today. Spoiler: it's not about writing a policy. It's about the small stuff. What We Cover 1. Belonging beyond a slogan We talk about why belonging is so fundamental, to individuals and to or...

What if the narratives running through your organization are shaping performance in ways you've never noticed? In this episode, Maddie and Kate explore the power of storytelling at three critical levels: the stories we tell ourselves, the stories around us, and the stories organizations tell. From growth mindset to system traps, from medieval fairs to Patagonia's environmental activism, we unpack...

How individuals influence culture (and what Zorro can teach us about it) Culture often gets talked about as something set by leaders, strategies and values decks. In this episode of A Curious Space, we zoom in somewhere else. We explore the role individuals play in shaping culture day to day, through small choices, habits and behaviours that quietly ripple out across teams and organisations. We un...

In this episode of A Curious Space, Kate and Maddie explore one of the biggest (and most underestimated) forces shaping organisational culture: leaders and founders. From emotional “weather systems” to decision-making habits and unexamined assumptions, this conversation looks at how culture is created every day — often unintentionally — through how leaders show up, decide, and relate to others. Al...

In the first episode of A Curious Space, hosts Kate Nicholroy and Maddie Fox kick off their opening series with a practical exploration of organisational culture: what it really is, how it forms, and why leaders can’t afford to ignore it. Moving beyond values statements and posters on the wall, Kate and Maddie unpack culture as “the way things actually get done around here” — the visible and invis...

Episode 0: Welcome to a Curious Space What does it really mean to be human at work, and why does that matter more than ever right now? Senior leaders are under more pressure than ever, to deliver results, keep teams engaged, and drive innovation, while navigating constant change and uncertainty. In this intro episode, Kate Nicholroy and Maddie Fox explain why curiosity and culture are the two most...