How can people keep thinking something when evidence around them is screaming a different reality? How can we make sure that thinking blocks don’t happen to us? It’s more common that we would like to believe. We may want to be independent thinkers, but we end up following the crowd, arriving at conclusions that are […]
How to Manage an Organization through Complexity (Go Patriots)
How do we manage an organization to cope with complexity? It means understanding the organization as a system and seeing the interdependencies, something that the Patriots understand. Independence vs. interdependence What can the theory of systems tell us about managing organizations? First of all, if all the components that make up the system are independent, then […]
Don’t Cut Through Complexity: Understand it and Manage It (Sorry, KPMG)
KPMG has the tagline “Cutting through Complexity” which suggests they really don’t understand complexity at all. In order to deal with complexity, we first have to understand it, and then we can manage it. How? What does complexity actually mean? “Complexus”, the Latin word for “complex”, roughly means “twisted together”. In other […]
Freeing Yourself from Limiting Beliefs
We’re getting ready to launch our new eBook ‘The Human Constraint’, a business novel for the New Economy. We’re excited to share a snippet of the accompanying online learning centre that accompanies each chapter of the novel. This section deals with limiting beliefs and a tool to overcome them. Assumptions and limiting beliefs In a chapter […]
Holacracy vs. Hierarchy? The Answer Lies in Managing Complexity.
A recent article about the company Zappo’s relates how they have chosen a new organizational structure of holacracy that removes traditional managers and job titles. They believe this new structure will allow them to grow in a way that is less rigid and bureaucratic. While this may be a move in the right direction from […]
How to See the Future with Science – Part Two on Predicting Process Behaviour
In Part Two of this article on predicting the future with science, we look at the tool from Statistical Process Control that helps us understand behaviour patterns in our processes so we can make more informed decisions. When is a process predictable? We say that a process is “predictable” when it is in a […]
Education Is A Serious Business
A new book by American journalist Amanda Ripley looks at highly reputed education systems in the world. Her findings on what makes these schools successful may be a surprise to many. In an article in the Globe and Mail, they condense the lessons learned form Ripley’s research into seven key points. We would like to […]
How To Embed Creative Business Thinking In Your Organization
We may think we know how to think, but can we do it better? This post looks at some tools for systematic, creative thinking for business (and beyond). A recent article in the Globe and Mail newspaper asks the question, how can we produce more creative business thinkers? What sort of things should business schools […]
Mining the Past to Create the Future
The ancient industry of glass blowing in Venice is threatened by a grim economy, changing taste, and cheaper alternatives. A recent article from The Economist concentrates on the famous island of Murano and the challenges facing the centuries-old tradition. One glass-blowing studio in Murano has found success by working with fine artists to produce rare […]
Connecting in a Network? Its usefulness is all about affinity.
Is all that effort to make connections in a network a waste of time? Network theory has something to teach us about all that. A lot of energy is consumed every day by people, groups, and organizations who frantically try to make as many connections as possible. They do so for a reason: to increase […]
