A recent NYT article talks about South Africa’s Subprime Crisis. The article draws attention to the downward economic spiral created by unsecured credit in South Africa. The author of the article, T. O. Molefe, describes the situation succinctly and clearly. South Africa’s regulations had saved the country from the 2007 USA Subprime fallout. Sadly, South Africa now has its own […]
Archives for August 2014
Systems Thinking for Public Policy? Yes please.
Public policy can have severe unintended consequences. What can Systems Thinking do to bring results without the collateral damage? The Mayor of Somerville Mass. is applying systems thinking to creating public policy. An article in Governing.com informs about how linear logic drastically failed the Boston suburb of Somerville when a highway and […]
Don’t get stuck on thinking blocks. Think again, think better (systemically)
How can people keep thinking something when evidence around them is screaming a different reality? How can we make sure that thinking blocks don’t happen to us? It’s more common that we would like to believe. We may want to be independent thinkers, but we end up following the crowd, arriving at conclusions that are […]
How to Manage an Organization through Complexity (Go Patriots)
How do we manage an organization to cope with complexity? It means understanding the organization as a system and seeing the interdependencies, something that the Patriots understand. Independence vs. interdependence What can the theory of systems tell us about managing organizations? First of all, if all the components that make up the system are independent, then […]
Don’t Cut Through Complexity: Understand it and Manage It (Sorry, KPMG)
KPMG has the tagline “Cutting through Complexity” which suggests they really don’t understand complexity at all. In order to deal with complexity, we first have to understand it, and then we can manage it. How? What does complexity actually mean? “Complexus”, the Latin word for “complex”, roughly means “twisted together”. In other […]
Freeing Yourself from Limiting Beliefs
We’re getting ready to launch our new eBook ‘The Human Constraint’, a business novel for the New Economy. We’re excited to share a snippet of the accompanying online learning centre that accompanies each chapter of the novel. This section deals with limiting beliefs and a tool to overcome them. Assumptions and limiting beliefs In a chapter […]