Connection or Connector
Healthy systems are beautifully connected.Some are conscious like running or jumping, some are autonomic like breathing or heartbeats. …
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 …
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 …
Changing thinking changes doing
So what would happen if we changed the way we thought about this. What would happen if we stopped thinking …
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 …
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 …
Inside Total Place
The most basic of the connections was at the very local level, as people who worked with particular families or …
Machiavelli: Change Management
Machiavelli, (The Prince), is often thought of as a ruthless and unscrupulous adviser, but look more closely and it’s clear …
Defining Systems Thinking
Defining systems thinking is somewhat of an impossible task. There are arguably dozens of possible descriptions and definitions, often with …
And who are you?
Does how you respond get conditioned by who asks the question? In what circumstances? In what environment? Do you always …
Dialogue- Isaacs
Often the typical meeting room is full of people holding a series of conversations that come preloaded with hidden paradigms …
Kantor – 4 Player Model
The Four Player Model developed by David Kantor is at the core of the theory of structural dynamics. Structural dynamics …
Embrace Complexity- Don’t Suppress it
By John Atkinson. If we genuinely believe the world to be a complex place, we need to consciously embrace that …
Cass Sunstein on Nudge Theory
In this excerpt from the event, ‘Why Nudge?’, renowned public thinker Cass Sunstein defends his groundbreaking nudge theory …
Deming’s 14 points
A reminder of J Edwards Deming’s 14 points, the father of process improvement. Interesting, isn’t it, just how often these …
Why organisations don’t learn
virtually all leaders believe that to stay competitive, their enterprises must learn and improve every day. But even companies revered …
Doomed to Failure
In a living system the clue is in the name. You have to ‘grow’ something. Something that infects the system …
Bion’s Basic Assumption Groups
Bion suggested that all groups have a subconscious emotional drive that affects their every thought and action. It is determined …
The work of Keith Grint OR critical tame and wicked… and so much more
In the art of formulating the question together we begin our process of change. There are few things as potent …
Arygris- Theories of Action
According to Chris Argyris everyone and everywhere (systems) have an internal ‘mental map’. These mental maps influence behaviour, thought and …
Lewin- Force Field Analysis
By Emma Loftus No, it’s not sci-fi. Force Field Analysis, sometimes called Field Theory, is a change tool developed by …
Ed Schein- The Three Levels of Organisational Culture
For Ed Schein approaching change is all about culture. Understand a culture and you can understand how to work with …
Chris Arygris- Double Loop Learning
In learning about their shared tacit assumptions or governing variables, systems then become able to understand the reasons that problems …
Ed Schein’s Principles of Helping
Process Consultation is a practice of intervention and change that is based on the simple principle that learning and change …
Video- Timothy Gallwey: The Inner Game in action
This short video shows Gallwey demonstrating the inner game coaching method. Showing what can be achieved when the mind is …
Video- Scharmer: The Three Enemies
This video from Otto Scharmer and The Presencing Institute introduces the concept of ‘the three enemies’. (Global Classroom Lecture 3: …
The Nature of Scale
As more people join, the levels of complexity grow both in terms of who ‘we’ are and how we relate …
What Plato’s Cave Tells Us About Managing Change
The Allegory of The Cave features as part of Plato’s wider work The Republic. It suggests that in an ever …
Learning History
The purpose of The Learning History is to capture the learning and the experience of ‘change’ in systems in a …
The Game of Rice
There’s a common maths problem that comes in various guises. The problem illustrates the concept of geometric series, sometimes called …
Aristotle- the purpose of life
Aristotle is arguably the most well known name and philosopher in the world. Musing some two thousand or so years …
World Cafe
Here, Juanita Brown, the founder of world cafe introduces the basic practice, principles and history of world cafe, a way …
Wujec: Draw Toast
Systems thinker Tom Wujec designed a simple workshop exercise to highlight the complexity of thought and influence that surround problem …