Last week my wife and I took our 7-year-old, Grayson, to an animal reserve for his birthday. Shout out to Port Lympne in Kent.

Genuinely better than hiring a soft play trampoline park that smells of feet!

He loved hand-feeding the giraffes. His ultimate highlight though was… feeding lions with tongs (which is basically “hand-feeding” if you value keeping your hands).

What I wasn’t ready for was the noise.

When a lion roars, it doesn’t just sound loud it makes you PAY ATTENTION NOW!

Maybe you’ve met a lion at work…

In my new book Surviving The Stakeholder Safari one of the 50 animals I’ve included is the LION.

In the book LION stands for: Loudly Insists On Now.

You’ll recognise them because they don’t talk…they roar:

• three items suddenly “need doing immediately”

• two deadlines are “already late”

• and something that wasn’t even on the radar yesterday has somehow become “top priority”

They lead with intensity and use volume + urgency to signal conviction. They’ll often see it as “passionate efficiency”… but the side-effect is predictable: people shortcut their thinking, quieter voices shrink back, and long-term strategy gets traded away for movement.

If one of these characters is impacting your project or product development then there are ways you can “tame” them…in my new book…

The paperback is out now, and the digital version is coming soon.

What have you seen work or not work when it comes to behavioural change in your workplace or community?