Organisational Wisdom

The team is dead, long live the team! In a rapidly changing and competitive environment, companies must innovate to survive. The future of work is the project team - knowledge workers who come together to deliver on a project before breaking up and moving on to the next one. But forming a project team based on the expertise of the team members doesn't always work. Egos are often at stake, and more often than not team dynamics swamps the technical potential of the team. So, what's the secret of getting project teams to perform at their best? A 2012 Harvard University study found the way teams shared knowledge significantly determined how well they performed. They coined the term knowledge integration capability  to refer to a reliable pattern of team communication that helps the team to understand complex problems and get better outcomes. They looked at 79 client-facing teams in a professional services firm, and here's what they found: Knowledge integration capabi...

If you've had anything to do with bringing about change in groups, teams or organisations you know how much intensive effort it can take. It requires a shift in perspective, much like the Apollo 17 photo of the Earth. We saw for the first time how fragile our planet is, and how interconnected we all are. I'm presently in a small village an hour's drive west of Berlin where I'm attending the Presencing Foundation Program with Otto Scharmer from MIT. There are 80 delegates from 20 different countries. The program is all about the frameworks, methodology, and experiential learning for bringing about change in social systems. How do you change social systems? According to Otto there are just two things which bring about the shift: Courage : Having the courage to try something new, to sense and learn from the emerging future, not just the past. Loving Attention : The quality of our attention is shaping the world around us. Energy follows attention. And when we pay ...

Why do we have such a hard time making good choices? When it comes to making decisions, we're naturally biased to think that we are all good decision makers. Just as most people in hospital after a vehicle accident they caused still maintain they are good drivers. There's ample evidence that our brain's are flawed. And in business that costs money. But how can we do better? Researchers, Dan Lovallo, and Oliver Sibony, investigated 1,048 important business decisions over 5 years, tracking both the ways the decisions were made and the subsequent outcomes. They found that in making most of the decisions, the teams had conducted rigorous analysis. They also asked the teams about their decision process - the softer, less analytical side of the decision. Had the team explicitly discussed what was still uncertain about the decisions? Did they include perspectives that contradicted the senior executive's point of view? Did they elicit participation from a range of peopl...

So, you think you're pretty good at making decisions, and you naturally assume most everything you do is under your conscious control - right? Wrong! It turns out most of  what you do and think and feel isn't under your conscious control at all. Your brain is in the business of gathering information and steering behaviour quickly and automatically and outside of your consciousness. It doesn't need you to stop and think. You operate day-to-day on multiple feedback loops - habits, that are hidden from view. As Pink Floyd put it, "There's someone in my head, but it's not me." What happens when you want to change one of these feedback loops? How do you take back conscious control of your own brain? Habits First, you need to know something about the machinery of the brain. Habits emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. The process of habit-formation is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells yo...

Managing a business, government agency, or community organisation would be so much easier if wasn't for people! They just seem to pull this way and that with no rhyme or reason. How do you figure out what motivates them and how do you get them to point in the same direction? It might seem like a tug-of-war sometimes, but it's actually quite simple. There are just two things you can do to compel people to do what you want them to do. The first is strength . This is the capacity to make things happen with abilities and force of will. People who project strength command our attention. Strength consists of two elements: Ability, or competence; and will, or determination, perseverance and resilience. You can influence people to do what you want them to do through assertiveness and dominance. The very act of asserting yourself boosts your standing as someone who matters. But strength alone will only take you so far. To move beyond respect to admiration, you also need to be li...

Never in human history have we seen so many technologies coming together at such a rapid pace. "Moore's Law" has seen the doubling of price/performance in computing continue uninterrupted for half a century. But the same is true of information. Once any domain, discipline, technology, or industry becomes information-enabled, its price/performance begins doubling every year or two. Ray Kurzweil, co-founder of  Singularity University , calls this the Law of Accelerating Returns (LOAR). We are entering the age of the exponential organisation driven by a new breed of newly democratised, exponential technologies. But who will lead these organisations, and will they do so with wisdom? According to Salim Ismail and co-authors of the book, Exponential Organizations ,   we are facing four historically un ique levels of convergence: The continuous acceleration of specific computation technologies occurring in areas such as In...