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
Author: Heart of the Art
Heart of the Art was launched by John Atkinson and Emma Loftus in 2014, We've grown into more than we ever could imagine. A place to explore what it means to really make meaningful change, in a world that is messy, complex, and beautifully human.
‘Last Winter’
To undertake such a journey is to soak into a world of deep awareness. Conscious thought and sub-conscious intuition interchanged with each other, uninterrupted by others interjections. Alone, in the arctic wilderness I exclaimed aloud
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
Taylorism and Meaning
John Atkinson is a co-curator of Heart of the Art Frederick Winslow Taylor was a much misunderstood man. He is now famous for 'Scientific Management' and is credited as the father of modern management consulting.
Dietary Warning: Consultants may damage your health
An interesting but clearly wrong conclusion would be that if you eat a lot, you too can be an elite athlete. Its the old conundrum between correlation and causality. So the recent research from Bristol,
John Atkinson introducing systems leadership
Systems leadership has come to mean working beyond organisational boundaries to address issues of mutual concern. This raises questions that challenge many assumptions about how to address issues that are of interest beyond the individual.
Exploring Capra
Fritjof has been one of the key influencers in encouraging a shift from a Cartesian view of the world that separates things into their constituent parts and a more holistic way of considering things.
What is systems leadership?
The challenges that require you to work together are complex. You don’t ‘deliver’ a change in global quality standards and you don’t ‘deliver’ a healthier or wealthier population. Lots of people will need to change
Taiichi Ohno’s 7 Wastes
There is often confusion as to the term system thinking. For some it means improvement processes, maybe based in the Toyota Production System (TPS). For others it means considering systems as living things and the