Simon Blake

It is World AIDS Day this weekend. And each year it gives me so much joy to see the progress that is being made in the UK and in many parts of the world. As a gay man who grew up in the 1980s in the long dark shadow of fear, stigma and shame of HIV, and worked as a Gay Men’s HIV Prevention worker in the mid-90s, it is just divine to see stigma being tackled head on, the quality of treatment, the Undetectable = Untransmittable campaign and the determined focus from activists and organisations to make PrEP available freely, widely and to everybody that needs it. What a distance we have travelled. When I first had a HIV test at University it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. The questions about my sexual experiences made me question whether I was really gay after all.   What were those sexual acts, and did people really do those things?   And if they did, did I really have to talk about them? The pre-test counselling - whilst good intentioned - creat

I have been in a lot of team building days and training over the past 20 years teaching me – and those I work with  - to ‘value and be better at conflict’ and to ‘recognise the value of healthy conflict and healthy challenge’. We have often been offered frameworks that help us have ‘courageous conversations’. Last week I was on an excellent team day with my Exec. We looked at Leonici’s five dysfunctions of a high performing team https://www.tablegroup.com/books/dysfunctions . Like most models of high performing teams, Leonici’s model sets out the need for healthy conflict. If you google conflict as a noun you will find that ‘conflict is a serious disagreement or argument, typically a protracted one.’ I am not sure there is much about that which sounds healthy for the workplace. So I have a provocation: We need a shift of mindset which leans away from high performing teams require healthy conflict, towards a mindset that says high performing teams must have, express and explo