This week was the official date of publication by Routledge of ‘The Human Constraint: How Business Leaders Can Embed Continuous Innovation, Conflict Resolution and Problem Solving Into Daily Practice’. The author, Angela Montgomery, marks the occasion with this blog post.
Why do we bother with books? Without books, our lives are clamped and constricted to what we see around us. Our language is basic and our thoughts cannot soar beyond our primal needs. Many books are not worth our time, but good books educate, entertain, inform, influence and shape us. They free us. Sometimes, a single book can change our life.
It’s hard to write a book. You don’t know how long it will take or if you will be satisfied with the results, but you know what the outcome will be–a book. We can’t know all the outcomes of the efforts we make, but one thing is sure: without a goal or a vision, our energies can easily dissipate. We may even give up.
The Human Constraint: A blessing that may look like a curse
I first started working on ‘The Human Constraint’ in the wake of the greatest financial crisis of our times. People lost their homes and jobs and countless lives were shattered. Many would never recover, and yet the banks were bailed out. I decided to write about it. This catastrophe might just be a catalyst to open up to a new paradigm of business. I could not write about banks and their misdemeanours, but I could write about something I knew: a vision for a world of business that directly enhances people’s lives, free of zero sum game and where all the stakeholders benefit. Based on nearly two decades of in-the-field research and development with dozens of businesses, I could write about the thinking, method and tools to put the vision into practice. As someone with a literary academic background, it made sense to follow Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt’s example and write about business as a story. It made even more sense because I wanted to draw attention to something I had observed in working with companies time and again and that is profoundly human. The greatest barrier and greatest opportunity we face as individuals in our lives and businesses is our cognitive or human constraint. This is the set of assumptions or limiting beliefs that keep us stuck in a current reality that is not what we want. This feeling of “stuckness” is in itself an indicator that we are ready to break through into a new phase of growth.
The paradoxical nature of a constraint is that it constrains or limits us, but we can use that very limitation to unleash potential we would otherwise not access. Think of a dam and the way it constrains water, and yet that constraint is what produces hydroelectric energy. Every time we bump into our human, cognitive constraint, it is an opportunity to push through that barrier to a new breakthrough. Guiding a company through this process has been central to our work at Intelligent Management for almost three decades. Not only is it exhilarating to find a new path forward for an organization, it can reveal hidden capabilities.
You can purchase ‘The Human Constraint: How Business Leaders Can Embed Continuous Innovation, Conflict Resolution and Problem Solving Into Daily Practice‘ from Amazon or directly from the publisher Routledge here:
To find out more about ten guided steps to a systemic leap ahead for your company, contact Angela Montgomery at intelligentmanagement@sechel.ws
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Intelligent Management works with decision makers with the authority and responsibility to make meaningful change to optimize your company for the digital age. We have helped dozens of organizations to adopt a systemic approach to manage complexity and radically improve performance and growth for over 25 years through our Decalogue management methodology. The Network of Projects organization design we developed is supported by our Ess3ntial software for multi-project finite scheduling based on the Critical Chain algorithm.
See our latest books: The Human Constraint from Taylor & Francis; From Silos to Networks: A New Kind of Science for Management from Springer; Moving the Chains: An Operational Solution for Embracing Complexity in the Digital Age by our Founder Dr. Domenico Lepore, and ‘Quality, Involvement, Flow: The Systemic Organization’ from CRC Press, New York by Dr. Domenico Lepore, Dr. Angela Montgomery and Dr. Giovanni Siepe.
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