What we need to learn

Bring to mind one of your best working moments.  One of those times when you felt on top of the world, when you were just ‘flowing’ or when you felt the warm glow of success.  It could have been when that new client signed up with you…..when you finally worked through a long-standing conflict with…

Your Work is Your Work

Charles Darwin is apocryphally quoted as saying, “It’s not the biggest, the brightest, or the best that will survive, but those who adapt the quickest.”  While he may not have actually said it, the sentiment stands. It is therefore vital that we develop ways and practices that assist us to learn about ourselves.  Much has…

Counter-acting the Stockholm Syndrome

Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages display empathy and sympathy for their captors, often developing positive feelings towards them and defending them. I’m often fascinated by how people, when they walk through the door of their workplaces, adopt behaviours akin to the symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome.  Despite knowing in our hearts and…

I am the Walrus

Know how you have an experience and some song lyrics pop into your head that seem to have been written especially for it?  “Expert textpert, choking smoker, don’t you think the joker laughs at you?”  Parallel process.  Happens to me all the time when I’m working.  I suddenly notice that what the client is doing,…

A Matter of Life and Death

Why would the whole of the Universe be a complex, self-organising and interdependent system, and a business be a top-down, controlled machine?  Why would the entire Universe be subject to the laws of Nature, and business, not?  It’s almost as some businesses they think they exist in some bubble, where the laws of nature are…

Leadership is an inside job

So the world didn’t end on December 21, surprise, surprise.  Here we are in 2013, all systems still intact.  I have heard some speak of the Mayan December 21 end-of-all-things-prediction not so much an end of the world, but more of an end of one cycle and the beginning of another.  An end of things-as-they-were.…

It’s not a behavioural problem: it’s the system

Don’t ask a systems thinker for advice on managing performance or staff engagement.  They will probably say something pretty fruity and you’ll wind up frustrated by how fervently they trash conventional wisdom on the subject.  Of course performance, engagement, recruitment, they’re all connected, so your systems thinking friend will sound like a fruit loop because…

What is systems thinking? (Part III)

Part III (Going Further) In Part II of this article, I suggested that if we remain wedded to a mis-placed set of thoughts and beliefs about business, we will end up asking the wrong questions.  We cleverly ask these questions from within our  old intellectual bubble, coming up with “new-and-improved” solutions to problems, however we…

Stop de-motivating people

Fresh from running a workshop on responsible leadership, I’m feeling buoyant that the participants entered into the conversation with gusto and were open to the idea that humans engage in their work because they seek out meaning, mastery and autonomy.  To a large extent, I was not only preaching to the converted but taking the…

In transition

The cosmos is a complex, and sometimes confusing, place. Every three or four months, the planet Mercury goes retrograde.  What this means is that if you track its movement in the sky, it will appear to move backwards for about 3 weeks and then it continues its forward course.  In ancient Greece, the planets used…