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How organisational OCD is stamping out innovation and agility

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a debilitating anxiety disorder that can have devastating consequences for the individual that suffers from it. I think there is a similar disorder that organisations suffer from ... I call it Obsessive Certainty Disorder.  It too is linked with anxiety and the need for control.   And it too has devastating consequences, […]
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8 guidelines to enable organisational fluidity

While preparing for my recent keynote at Agile Africa, I came across the work of Prof Adrian Bejan, a mechanical engineer who contributed to the field of thermodynamics through his constructal law, which is formulated as follows: “For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that […]
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Ten things to keep in mind when facilitating an emergent process

"Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking. Traveller, the path is your tracks And nothing more. Traveller, there is no path The path is made by walking. By walking you make a path And turning, you look back At a way you will never tread again Traveller, there is no road […]
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Learnings from Whistler: Scaffolding emergence

In June this year I had the privilege of attending the Cynefin Retreat in Whistler, Canada along with many Cynefin practitioners that up to then, I only knew virtually.  The opportunity to finally meet in person was incentive enough to attend, however even that couldn’t compete with the stimulating ideas we engaged with over the […]
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Two Sensemaker® projects to understand opposites on the generational spectrum

More Beyond is partnering with KLA on two open Sensemaker® based research projects to understand how South Africans on opposite ends of the generational spectrum view the future. The first project was done in partnership with The Refirement Network and seeks to understand how South Africans over 45 think about their next season.  We are […]
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Enabling adaptive space

I had the privilege this week to co-facilitate an Adaptive Space workshop with Prof Mary Uhl-Bien at a local business school. I’ve long been intrigued by her work, so it was really good to see it applied practically. As always, I’m left with a need to make sense of where it fits into other complexity […]
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Is faster always better? The case for a certain slowness

In the so-called VUCA world where greater agility seems to have be the only response, this is an important question. Even though agility is about much more than speed, the first response I often get when I ask leaders why they’ve embarked on so-called Agile Transformation processes is “we need to be faster”. The maturity […]
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Seven implications of complexity for organisations

My last post was about Paul Cilliers's 7 characteristics of complex systems.  In this post I want to explore 7 of the implications of complexity that he thought was important for those working in and on organisations  (his original text is in italics). 1.Since the nature of a complex organization is determined by the interaction […]
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7 Characteristics of complex systems

I have been re-reading the work of Prof Paul Cilliers, who truly was a pioneer in complexity thinking.  I came across this summary of the general characteristics of complex systems in a piece he wrote in 2000.  It is a concise and accessible qualitative description of complexity and I thought it would be useful to […]
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Recent Sensemaker project roundup

Over the last year we've had the opportunity to do a couple of really interesting Sensemaker projects.  For those who are interested in South African cases, here's a summary: Financial services: We have gotten a lot of traction in the customer insights space, specfically in the financial services industry.  This industry operates in a very […]
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