Organisational Wisdom

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...

Is your team running at full power? You mostly know what it feels like when things are going well. But how do you measure this - are things really as good as they seem, or is there room for improvement with your team? Based on a comprehensive data set of interviews with over 15,000 leaders, it's now possible to show what every leader can do immediately to improve their team's performance. The results might surprise you! It starts with asking yourself and your team the question, "are we running at full power?" What were the times in your career when things just clicked and what were the times when things felt clunky and hard? The research undertaken by Geoff Smart, Randy Street and Alan Foster (2015) found just three distinct groupings of strengths and competencies. Ask yourself these questions: Priorities Do we have the right priorities? Are they connected to the mission in a compelling way? Are they correct and likely to produce the right results? Are...

Leaders like to use their strengths to achieve quick, dramatic results; they like to believe they are as good as everyone says they are, and not take their weaknesses too seriously; they believe that some people are superior and some are inferior; they put their faith in talent; and they see themselves as "the smartest guys in the room". Sound familiar? Evidence from the Global Financial Crisis shows that when people work in an environment that esteems them for their innate talent, they have difficulty when their image is threatened; they won't admit they're wrong to peers and stakeholders, and they won't take remedial action. Ultimately a company that can't self-correct can't thrive. And the rest, as they say, is history! What's the alternative? The alternative is leaders with a 'growth mindset'. They believe in human development; they're not constantly trying to prove they're better than others; they don't highlight bein...