How do you overcome the wall of indifference people can have to your ideas to make things better? Bottom line: Don’t push harder to be heard— make it matter more so they start to listen. Inside are five actions to help you do this and have your ideas be heard.

Getting pushback is common challenge. Pushback met with more force just creates bigger barriers. The smart approach is isn’t to push harder, it’s to invite curiosity.

Most people look at what happened and stop there. The pros ask, “What could have happened instead?” That’s counterfactual thinking, the quiet superpower behind great problem solvers and innovators, from the engineers that saved NASA’s Apollo 13 crew to anyone brave enough to imagine a better way forward.

Focus is fragile. Your brain sips from a firehose of a billion bits per second while conscious thought crawls along at only ten. The trick to greater focus for longer isn’t working harder, it’s designing our environment and routines to optimise the little attention we can give at any one time.

Sometimes we don't realise we're already standing on a mountain of value. What unlocks it is looking at different ways of using what we already have. Inside is the story of how an engineer working on making Disney anamatronics more life like helped create one of the worlds leading guitar string brands using the same solution.

To solve twin business survival problems of drink spiking fears and cost of living pressures, Manchester’s XLR night club has just done something radical, they've borrowed a strategy used by another industry: BYOB. People can now bring their own drinks to the club in return for slightly higher ticket prices. It’s a great reminder, innovation doesn’t mean invention - it also means adaption.

Productivity isn’t about just about speed, it’s about creating greater impact. The most simple productivity hack is to cut out what’s no longer needed. What we do, day in day out, often hides a black hole of productivity loss. Taking a spring cleaning approach to what we do creates space for more of what we need to do.

Breakthroughs don’t come from thinking the same. They ‘break’ something that is usually taken for granted. A simple way to do this is to take one feature or frustration of a product, service or process and push it to the opposite extreme. Like 10x a price, cutting process time to zero or having no customer support. That’s what Apple, Atlassian and Zoom have done to create break through ideas that work.

We chase certainty because it feels safe, but Daniel Kahneman showed us that this instinct, what he called the Certainty Effect, often means we sell ourselves short. Over the past 20 years, the ASX 200 rewarded those who leaned into calculated risk far more than bonds ever did. The real lesson: slowing down, grounding decisions in data, and collaborating with others can help us escape the trap of selling ourselves short.