In the previous part of this series, Part 5: Learning to Think Systemically to Make Informed Decisions and Pre-empt a Crisis, we saw how the Conflict Cloud Thinking Process helps us identify a situation of blockage and understand why this blockage exists in the first place. What keeps us stuck is the set of assumptions, or […]
Using Your Constraints to Improve Business Performance
On a client’s website, they rightfully explain that their technology frees their customers of certain constraints. What exactly do we mean by constraints and are they a totally bad thing? We all want more freedom. A constraint would seem, by definition, to be something that robs us of freedom. But what we need to do […]
Continuous Innovation: Why Leaders Must Upgrade Their Thinking Skills
There is a lot of noise in our world today about innovation, particularly technological innovation. Undoubtedly, technology is a powerful aid to sustain transformation, but we need to understood what innovation really means. For managers and leaders, the question of innovation and technology has to be a fundamental part of their education process. Innovation Can (and Must) Be […]
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 […]
How Innovation Can Make Companies Smarter
Dr. Domenico Lepore, an international expert on systems thinking for management and Founder of Intelligent Management Inc. completes this mini-series on innovation. Focus and continuous innovation An organization requires great focus in order to keep up with the continuous innovation process. The focus needed can only be developed as a result of an improved “collective […]
Innovation, Leadership and Quality: How They Interconnect
Dr. Domenico Lepore, Founder of Intelligent Management Inc. and international expert in Quality and Systems Thinking for organizations, continues his series on Innovation. Leadership: definition and role Earlier in this series we suggested the first 2 steps towards prosperous innovation: 1) creating an operational definition (see Prosperous Innovation) 2) challenging the assumption that imagination is […]
Imagination and Innovation
Continuing from our post yesterday, Prosperous Innovation. Imagination and Innovation – are they the same? In our previous post, we suggested there are several steps towards prosperous innovation, the first of which is to create an operational definition for innovation. The second step is to invalidate the flawed assumption that equates “imagination” with “Innovation”. Imagination […]
Prosperous Innovation
What better subject matter for our new blog layout than innovation? This post is by Dr. Domenico Lepore, an international expert on systems thinking for management. Together with Oded Cohen he developed the Decalogue Management Methodology, combining the management philosophy of the founding father of Quality, W. Edwards Deming, with the Theory of Constraints. Innovation […]
Why Organizations Get Stuck
Every kind of organization aspires to achieve its goal with increasing effectiveness. In order to do so, it has to do two fundamental things: grow innovate It has to grow because every living organism is either growing or its dying. It has to innovate because the reality it interacts with is constantly evolving. To […]
True Innovation: How to Do It
What exactly is innovation? One thing it is not is “a good idea”. There are plenty of good ideas in the world but that is not enough to build a project, let alone a start-up. And yet it happens. Time, money and resources are invested in “good ideas” that do not have legs and so […]