We’re honoured to be invited to speak at the Horasis Global Forum this week, held in Cascais near Lisbon, Portugal. Our specific contribution will be a systemic perspective on what can support competitiveness at a national level.
Horasis brings together heads of state, global leaders in the commercial and public sectors and innovators. We are proud to heave been chosen for our innovative work in transforming organizations from hierarchies and silos to whole systems through a Network of Projects approach.
As we approach this meeting of leaders, reading the newspapers it is palpable that we are living through a leadership crisis, especially in Europe as the Brexit debacle never ceases to bring dismay.
Leadership crisis
Jean-Claude Juncker, the European commission president has described former UK Time Minister David Cameron as “one of the biggest destroyers in the modern era” for his role in the Brexit referendum and what came after.
As reported by The guardian, in a speech on Saturday, Germany’s EU minister, Michael Roth, told an audience in Berlin: “Brexit is a big shitshow. I say that now very undiplomatically,” and added that “90%” of the British cabinet had “no idea how workers think, live, work and behave”.
Precisely. We have leaders who are so distant from the lives of most people that they are structurally unable to provide solutions. In the UK, the traditional road to power has been precisely the route taken by the likes of David Cameron and Boris Johnson: elite schools such as Eton or Harrow, followed by Oxford or Cambridge. While this was the pattern that prepared the likes of Winston Churchill to be fit for greatness, it now appears to be failing miserably to prepare people who are competent. Our world has changed drastically from Churchill’s times when British leaders were shaped to lead an Empire. Trapped in the mental model of dominance, the shrinking Empire has not reacted in time to rethink the kind of education and preparation it takes to lead and create competitiveness in an interconnected world where what matters is managing interdependencies and removing artificial barriers to allow speed of flow, not creating artificial separations.
Changing the the learning path for competitiveness
This is true at the level of organizations as well as nations if we want to create sustainable prosperity. We urgently need to shift perspective to understand how we are all part of a network of networks. Competitiveness requires systemic knowledge and understanding and the ability to build win-win solutions. It calls for an upgrade in thinking skills in our leaders and a revision of our educational curricula and learning paths.
This is what we will be commenting on at Horasis. We back up our perspective with solid science, a robust methodology plus innovative technology. We look forward to engaging in conversations for action.
Since 1999, we have been presenting a new model for a systemic organization in detail, both in terms of the thinking behind it and how to conduct operations. We work alongside CEOs and Executive Teams to support the shift towards more effective, systemic strategy and operations. Our books include ‘Deming and Goldratt: The Decalogue‘, ‘Sechel: Logic, Language and Tools to Manage Any Organization’, ‘The Human Constraint‘ and most recently, ‘Quality, Involvement and Flow: The Systemic Organization’ . We support our international clients through education, training and the Ess3ntial multi-project software using Critical Chain to schedule competencies and unlock the potential of human resources. Based on our proprietary Decalogue methodology .
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