Teams are at the core of successful work in organizations. Very few things can be accomplished by individuals. There is increasing talk about teams. Inspiring work has been done in military environments, as illustrated through the book Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal. But what is a team? How do you choose the members, and […]
Archives for August 2017
Quality and Kindness: An Uplifting Healthcare Experience
Sometimes it can be useful to look at a system from an individual’s point of view, as the design of the system is what creates our experiences. So this blog post by Intelligent Management co-Founder Angela Montgomery takes an unusually personal slant. “We’ll keep an eye on you for five years,” my surgeon told me. […]
Systems Thinking and Public Policy – Start Making Sense
An article in Governing.com informs about how linear logic drastically failed the Boston suburb of Somerville when a highway and an overpass were built right through it. The unintended consequences of the road building that seemed rational were huge for the community of the suburb. Mayor Curtatone had the good sense to team up with a Systems […]
The Danger of False Assumptions – Learn to Think Better
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 […]
Thinking and Reasoning for Leadership Are Urgently Needed and Can Be Learned
Are we really capable of thinking and reasoning? Even a superficial glance at newspaper articles seem to suggest that we are not exercising these capacities. Joined up thinking is scarce. There is a crisis of leadership as one catastrophic decision after another shapes the lives of workers and citizens. The world is complex Our reality has […]
Why Teams Need Synchronization to Achieve the Goal – A Systems View
How do we manage an organization to cope with complexity? It means understanding the organization as a system and seeing the interdependencies. 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 the maximum result that the system can produce is simply […]
You Can’t Cut Through Complexity – KPMG Got It Wrong
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 words, when several elements come […]
Free Yourself and Your Organization from Limiting Beliefs
Every individual, business and organization experiences the sensation of getting stuck at some point. They know they are capable of doing more, even significantly more, but they don’t know how. We learn from the Theory of Constraints that this situation of blockage is an opportunity. It is created not by what is real but what […]
Nothing Is the Same: How to Survive and Thrive in Today’s Market
This month marks ten years since the start of the 2007 financial crisis. Our economic models have failed us. Anyone who has lived with the aftermath of that crisis knows that. Many have lost their jobs, or lost their investments and even their future prospects. Many who expected to have a smooth career path are getting […]
How a CIO Can Learn to Drive Real Business Results
Ideally, the role of the CIO should be to manage the Quality of how humans and technology interact to produce real business results. In reality, CIOs today find themselves constrained in what they can achieve operationally. On the one hand, they need to be able to improve business performance. This leads them to want to […]