On the Balcony with Simon Lamb is a podcast about seeing yourself, your work, and your world more clearly. Most of the challenges we face in life and leadership aren't caused by a lack of effort or intelligence. They come from the invisible patterns we can't see when we're caught up in the middle of things. The show takes its name from a simple but powerful idea: stepping off the dance floor and up onto the balcony, where you can finally see what's really going on. Each week, Simon sits down with leaders, practitioners, and fellow travellers who help us examine the assumptions we mistake for facts, question the stories we tell about ourselves, and make intentional choices about who we want to become.
I came to this one having had a properly bad morning. A shower that exploded over me, a client meeting I turned up to soaking wet, and a few things weighing considerably heavier than that. Megan Galloway arrived on the other side of it, celebrating two things at once. We decided to keep both in the room. Megan is a facilitator, a coach, and a friend who has taught me a great deal. We have been running parallel thinking for years without ever doing it in public, so a lot of this is said out lo...
24 Aug 2026
Episode #5 – On the Balcony with Dr Nicole Cunningham-Snell
I have been waiting to have this conversation for a long time. Nicole Cunningham-Snell is Vice President of Leadership Development at Shell, and her work sits where human potential meets the systems we live and lead inside. She has also shaped my own thinking more than she would ever admit. We start with volatility, at work and at home, and with the pressure every leader is under to look after today while seeing round corners for tomorrow. Then we open the mask wardrobe. Nicole names the mask...
1 Aug 2026
Episode #4 - Discovering Simon 2
The tables turn again, and this time I am the client. All models are wrong and some are useful, and this one is only useful if you can watch it working on a real life. So rather than explain Reframe as a framework, I asked Jaroslav to coach me through it live, using something from my own life that still has heat in it. We work with a moment of tension after my wife Monica’s second cancer diagnosis, and with what it revealed about the way fear, love and old survival patterns shape even our bes...
1 Aug 2026
Episode #3 – On the Balcony with Charlie Cannon
This one is personal. Charlie Cannon is one of the best leadership coach and resilience specialist that I know, and I still remember the first time we met. I was interviewing him for a big culture change programme in a bank, and I asked him why he personally wanted to be on it. He told me he wanted to heal the relationship with his father. That is more or less where this conversation picks up. We talk about the forces that shape a life and a leadership style. We kept returning to the same ide...
23 Jun 2026
Episode #2 – On the Balcony with Jo Whitfield
My first guest is my good friend Jo Whitfield, a retail executive I have worked with for nearly a decade and wanted on this podcast from the beginning. We start with the human reality behind the polished surface of senior leadership. The so-called ‘soft stuff’ is usually the hardest work a leader will ever do, and the most important. Jo then traces three moments that shaped her life and career, each one revealing the values that have anchored her decisions since. What surfaces are the quiet t...
19 Jun 2026
Episode #1 - Discovering Simon 1
I have spent a lot of my life asking other people about the moments that changed them. For the first episode, the tables are turned. Jaroslav interviews me. He has worked with me on and off for fifteen years, so there was not a great deal of room to hide, and what came out is an origin story rather than an introduction. I talk about three moments that forced me to reinvent myself, and that eventually led to the birth of Purposeful Change. None of them felt like growth at the time. Each one ta...
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