Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Since few professionals like to be told what to do, the manager must act through persuasion and cajoling, even where the manager sees the way clear. Living with the frustrations of building consensus and resisting the temptation to just act are a permanent struggle.
David H. Maister • Managing the Professional Service Firm
Your next move, your intervention, should reflect your hypothesis about the problem, be considered an experiment (by yourself and maybe others), and be in the service of a shared purpose. Well-designed interventions provide context; they connect your interpretation to the purpose or task on the table so people can see that your perspective is relev
... See moreRonald A. Heifetz • The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World
Gridlock results when individual actors continue to behave as if they were independent of everyone else— each pulling in a different direction,
Art Kleiner • The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies for Building a Learning Organization
Green is powerful as a paradigm for breaking down old structures, but often less effective at formulating practical alternatives.
Frédéric Laloux • Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness
Ed Batista (Executive Coach) on spending too much time on first-order problems, and not enough on second & third-order derivatives:
"The problem is that you're acting like a firefighter instead of a fire marshal. You're constantly rushing from one fire to the next, never slowing down to install smoke detectors. The problem is that a few fires ar
... See morePURPOSE An alternative method for telling your story, by hunting backward for the root cause of pernicious, recurring problems.* *This exercise is partly based on an established Japanese quality technique and its description by quality consultant Peter Scholtes. OVERVIEW Asking “Why, ” five times, in a team setting, with discussion.
Art Kleiner • The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies for Building a Learning Organization
For example, instead of looking at incidents through arbitrary categories (P1 to P4), System of Profound Knowledge could be used to identify common-cause and special-cause patterns across all incidents. Leadership would be those same supervisors using these incidents as on-the-job training opportunities. John Allspaw says incidents are “unplanned i
... See moreJohn Willis • Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge: How Deming Helped Win a War, Altered the Face of Industry, and Holds the Key to Our Future
The Systems Thinker – A Lifetime of Systems Thinking - The Systems Thinker
Russell Ackoffthesystemsthinker.com
shopping less for the sheer brain power of critical individuals and more for an organization that can bring past experience to bear in solving these problems.