Our brains really struggle to be rational. This is a big problem when it comes to management and making decisions, especially decisions about risk. What can we do about it? The improbability of probability The human mind is unable to process probability. It’s a scientific fact proved over the last 20 years in a slew of publications (and […]
Exploit the Constraint, Not Your People (Are you listening, Amazon?)
An article in ‘Business Insider’ this month revisits what it’s like to work at Amazon. While there may have been some improvement since the 2015 NYT article that referred to a bruising culture and people crying at their desks, there still seems to be evidence of exploitation. There is only one kind of exploitation in organizations […]
Managing Risk through a Leverage Point (constraint) – A Systems View
In our last post Understanding Uncertainty and Systemic Risk in Organizations we explained how management must involve the management of variation. Every single process, relationship and communication in our organization, whether we are aware of it or not, is affected by variation. If we ignore variation then we are not managing, and if we are not […]
Understanding Uncertainty and Systemic Risk in Organizations
If we could predict the outcome of everything we do with mathematical certainty, then our lives would be much simpler. In reality, we exist within a complex web of interdependencies and such certainty is not possible. Hence, we live with uncertainty and its inevitable companion: risk. We perceive a risk any time we feel that […]
Managing Risk and Fear
No one can deny that risk exists. It’s the potential to lose something of value. It would be irresponsible to ignore it. The question becomes, what kind of decisional practice and behaviors are operationally and economically effective when it comes to risk in organizations? Operating from fear An article in Mashable about Google+ is a […]
Achieving Laser Focus in a Meeting the Systemic Way
I recently participated in a meeting for an innovative digital project where speed is now of the essence. We were able to surface assumptions that saved us endless conversations, weeks of delay and false starts based on misunderstandings. In that meeting I saw in action, yet again, the power of a Thinking Process Tool from the […]
The Leaders We Need for Flatter Organizations
A leader is someone who connects with something deep inside you and brings out the leader in all of us. Ghandi, Churchill, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, these are some of the great leaders of our times. They inspired people to go beyond what they thought they were capable of to achieve something momentous for […]
Empowerment – Making it Work Operationally
If you look up “empowerment” on Google there are over 100 million items. So what do we mean by empowerment and why is it such a tricky matter? What tools can we use to make sure empowerment is done more effectively at an operational level? In any organization, things need to get done and people […]
How to Eliminate Toxic Beliefs that Choke Organizations
An excellent article entitled ‘5 Toxic Beliefs that Ruin Careers‘ hits on a key issue in life and business, namely how our perceptions affect the way we think and act. In this post, we look at how the Decalogue Methodology can address toxic beliefs. Why do some succeed where others fail in the same circumstances? […]
Tackling our Cognitive Constraints to Get to Breakthrough
A major stumbling block to growth for organizations lies in their cognitive constraints. In other words, there are mental models, or, more simply, limiting beliefs that prevent us from seeing solutions. In the Decalogue approach, we have worked over the last 20 years with hundreds of top and middle managers to build custom made implementations […]