Stepping Across A Threshold
When business environments change, businesses must change or become irrelevant. There’s plenty of good case examples of those that have done this successfully and those that have not.
Tag: john atkinson
Learning from Covid-19 – leadership for the 21st Century
The perspective someone uses when viewing the pandemic has a major influence on what they are prepared to act on, and how they will act.
Accompanying the waves of change
The real work is not in describing either the current world or a new one. It is in accompanying those who are trying to change in this current one. This is the second horizon or
Living Systems Leadership
For this reason I rejected the notion of a competence model of leadership. When head of a national leadership centre my refusal to adopt such a model or necessarily comply with others’ models drew sharp
Seeing Into Systems
For all of us, our first work with new systems can seem daunting. Our existing networks and knowledge may be helpful but insufficient in this new domain. We must work out what to do, who
Systems Leadership – Feeling Systems
At its best, systems leadership seems to exhibit an almost magical sense of the possible. Where people are locked in apparently intractable complexity, systems leadership seems to open up a new way through the mess.
Characteristics of Systems Leadership
The reality is that leadership through large, complex and politically contested issues can be very tough on the people involved. It challenges our perception as to what is for the best, and how best to
Caught in our stories
If you want a new strategy, you need a new story. So it’s worth pausing, taking time to uncover how you really came to be here. We rarely separate fact from fiction in our own
The 3D World
If we are to work with this most fundamental property of a living system then we learn about it through a process of intuition not deduction. So we can disrupt systems as experiments, but the
How the Organisation Subverts its Subversives
Just as a virus is constantly adapting as the immune system tries to defeat it, the change movement must learn to evolve. Being wedded to the form that lead to early success is a sure
The Myth of The Learning Organisation
It would be easy to conclude that The Learning Organisation is a fantasy. Global financing and market pressures will never allow such a concept to really happen. Shareholders will always take the short term return,
Understanding Identity
Every time we change our business or political structures, we provoke questions about our identity. Who really are we? What matters to us? How must we now connect? Here John Atkinson explores issues of identity
The Local Corporation
If the global business is to find a sustainable balance it must attend to the local as well as the global. This is to see unique local cultures as the source of growth, not discrepancies
Inside Total Place
The most basic of the connections was at the very local level, as people who worked with particular families or individuals made new relationships or refocused existing ones. We also connected places who were running
Systems Leadership or Emperors In New Clothes?
(By John Atkinson) Type 'what is leadership?' into google and you get 461 million responses. Do the same for ‘what is systems leadership?’ and you get 460 million. This suggests that there isn’t much clarity