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,
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.
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.
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
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
I was fortunate to be trained in leadership for a year at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. Towards the end, I was allowed to run the ‘enemy’ in key exercises. I rather enjoyed it; I
By John Atkinson. Living systems act to preserve their identity. If you perturb them they try to remove the source of perturbation. In short, if you try to change them, they try to kill the
Certain statements about problems are likely to be rendered false or meaningless if it can be shown that the problem is actually wicked,
We are all familiar with cultural change programmes. Sadly most of them are more like ‘Culture Change Pogroms’. They ask people to conform or go. If you don’t fit the new norm there is no
Whenever you try to reduce a complex dilemma to a binary issue you are wrong. The ‘Leave’ or ‘Remain’ question asked of the British people this week was therefore always incomplete. Politics in its most
Are you good enough to lead? Is there a problem in your organisation? Are you a senior person in that organisation? Have you been there any length of time? If the answers are yes then
Sometimes we think we've got it cracked, finally found the answer, discovered the insight, the key that unlocks everything. In such moments we might be reminded of the words of Donella (Dana) Meadows. Myron Rogers
From John Atkinson. I get repeatedly asked about the difference between working with the ecosystem (or human system) and working with formal organisations. For me this is largely a perceptual difference and yet perception is
When we don’t consider people’s lives in context, in their entirety, we design policy that manifestly fails. People on health related benefits are invariably suffering deeply yet we design inappropriate and simplistic policy to address
By John Atkinson Peter Drucker is credited as saying that ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’. It is certainly manna from heaven for those who love working in the cultural field of change. However it wasn’t