Making the best use of the resources we have in a sustainable way was always necessary, but it became dramatically evident and urgent following the Coronavirus crisis. The lockdowns that forced organizations to carry on working outside their normal locations accelerated a major change that was already taking place – the shift towards digital and […]
Vital Insights from Managing Variation and Constraints – Out of the Crisis Series Part 3
Putting new knowledge to work: Managing Variation and Constraints Stamp out the fire and get nowhere. Stamp out the fires puts us back to where we were in the first place. Taking action on the basis of results without theory of knowledge, without theory of variation, without knowledge about a system. Anything goes wrong, do something about it, […]
What’s Wrong with Organizational Structure – Out of the Crisis Series Part 2
Beneath the tragedy of lost and disrupted lives and the domino effect of economic hardship, the COVID-19 crisis revealed an organizational crisis. Many more crises have and will inevitably continue to plague the world going forward, perhaps with increasing frequency, and so it is vital to understand much better the underlying organizational paradigm and organizational structure […]
A Serious Knowledge Gap Affecting Leaders and Executives – Out of the Crisis Series Part 1
Introducing this series We decided to publish this series to comment on what we see as urgent leadership issues. The multiple global crises the world is experiencing are highlighting a serious knowledge gap affecting leaders and executives. This gap leaves them unprepared to interpret and respond with speed to complex, non-linear phenomena. It is nothing […]
How to Prevent Chaos in Any Project or Initiative
Projects, or any initiative we embark on, can easily get out of hand. They are subject to the chaos that can arise when human interactions are not governed by precise guidelines. Entropy exists and it affects behaviours as well everything else. When we use the Transition Tree Tool to break projects down into actions we […]
The Words We Use Can Change Our Reality – Shifting to a Systems View
This morning I spoke to a highly accomplished, bi-lingual woman who works in software. We agreed that the words we use when we work can have an enormous impact. For example, in her environment, the word “project” has acquired a stigma because of the pain associated with it so now she talks about “initiatives”. This […]
The Human Constraint – Going Beyond What We Think Is Possible
Our lives today are filled with unprecedented levels of rapid change and complexity. Unintended consequences can quickly emerge from inadequate leadership thinking, so we must urgently learn to think not just in a “joined-up” way but in a systemic way. This means developing the skills to: understand and analyze our current reality, as individuals and organizations; […]
Building Company Culture with Process flow
Building a company culture based on the principles of Quality, Involvement and Flow is not just about nice words. Together, these principles form the basis of a highly operational way to create an organization that satisfies the customer and the people working within it. It’s been our privilege over the years to help many companies work […]
Scheduling a Project – The Most Critical Activity For Every Business
Building an organization as a whole system all starts with scheduling, as pointed out by Dr. Domenico Lepore in Part 7 of this series. Here in Part 8 he introduces the all important subject of scheduling. The process of scheduling As we stated in Part 2 of this series, you cannot have the same person work […]
Transforming to an End-to-End Operating Model with a Whole System Technology
As Dr. Goldratt has pointed out, a technology is only of use when it removes a limitation. Here in Part 7 of this series, Dr. Domenico Lepore introduces the journey that led to a new technology for transformation. Our Journey: Ess3ntial My partners and I were not born digital; let’s say we all have vivid […]
