Learning we need to process and absorb before launching forwards: preparation for the adventure.
The scenario facing consulting firms is no different to any other organisation: how and what it does is driven by a set of underlying assumptions - assumptions that, in most cases, go unconsidered and...
Imagine you’re in a group working on a particular issue and you’re only allowed to speak if you’re going to say something new: something you’ve never seen, read or heard before. It’s hard. And it’s ha...
Hierarchy is not the problem. As such, a flatter structure alone won’t prepare an organisation to tackle today’s challenges because there is far more to questions of authority and power than structura...
The Status Quo 21st Century Orgs Low trust: Employees will behave selfishly without oversight and will deliver great work but only with external motivation. High trust. Employees will behave in the in...
Complicated systems are highly predictable; complex systems are the complete opposite. Understanding the distinction between the two is necessary for organisations because, to date, they have mostly v...
21st Century Organisations, as ecosystems, function far more like communities than they do companies (as we know them). Large companies increasingly talk about the need to model themselves on communit...
The idea of freedom sounds wonderful but, in reality, people are often hesitant to adopt it. Here’s why: The dominance of individualism Giving people more freedom only works if it is accompanied by a ...
“Partnership” is an alternative mental model that acts as both a high-level ideology for an organisation (i.e. how it sees its relationship with the world it inhabits) and a very particular relationsh...
The status quo organisation is out of its depth in the 21st Century - see: Why is the status quo not up to the 21st Century challenge?. And there are plenty of good reasons for why we can be encourag...