Routines, habits, life-acquired filters. They’re helpful in managing the day to day. On the other hand, rigidly adhered to, never examined for value, they become blinkers, or worse, blindfolds, blocking the light of higher possibility. The world shifts, its issues ever more pressing, our perspective stays stuck. We operate solo, and as organisations, on autopilot....
Change or transformation? Big, fat words, used interchangeably, describing radically different fields of play and outcomes. Change is like moving the deckchairs. Transformation puts us into an entirely different universe. A new state. Reimagined, reinvented. Think tadpole to frog, caterpillar to butterfly. In organisations, and life, change ensures we survive the headwinds and turbulence. It’s...
Growth is an ever present in our current discourse – in organisations as well as nationally and globally – centred entirely (or so it seems) on the financial economy. In business it’s about pulling the levers enabling one resource or constraining another to grow the numbers and bottom line in service of an exclusive group...
On one of our recent leadership programmes we asked people to envision the future shape and scope of a particular aspect of their business. ‘How will such and such look and feel in 25 years’ time?’ we asked. For some the pragmatism of now and what we know took over. Others let their imaginations run....
I’m wondering how different change might look and how well it might sustain if we started in a different place. Change often starts with the conviction that change is needed—generally because things aren’t going as well as desired. Missed or declining metrics (like profits) become the burning platform. And while everyone in the organisation can...
In organisational life system is often taken to mean a process by which things get done – various steps, specialists, teams/departments involved in creating a product or delivering a service. When things go wrong we look for the break in the system. Conventional wisdom suggests looking for an individual responsible for the failure. Their competence...
Most of us are familiar with the change curve and the stages we go through when facing a change – whether one we have chosen or something imposed on us. These days we are most likely experiencing wave after wave of change curve scenarios and finding ourselves at different places on each wave. This can...
As leaders we all hope to be visionary, don’t we? To aspire and inspire. We are fortunate in our interconnected world to have a window on the efforts of other visionary leaders, their impact and example. We can also discern, for ourselves, any gap between rhetoric and reality. A few days ago I was reminded...
Imagine all your previous learning and accumulated knowledge and skills being wiped out and then consider the words of American writer and futurist Alvin Toffler… ‘The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.’ Toffler’s words recognise the world we find...
As human beings we are constantly in the process of becoming. With the advance of each moment in time we are changing – physically, mentally, and emotionally. What might be missing though is how conscious we are of these changes. Physically (and biologically) our body is doing its thing. How aware, though, are we of...