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3 pieces of advice for leading a system turn around (especially for our new SA President)

“We incline to see history through the lives of great men. That inclination blinds us to the real complexity …”  - John Kay,  Obliquity Ever since his election as South Africa's new president, my news feed has been filled with posts from people telling Cyril Ramaphosa what his priorities should be.  He faces a seemingly […]
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Dave Snowden at TedX: A succinct overview of his groundbreaking work

Dave at TedX
I first met Dave in 2002 when we were both employed by IBM.  I remember experiencing an immediate resonance with his work, especially the inherent integrity of honoring context and not mindlessly applying best-practice recipes as the big consultancies tend to do. It is now 16 years later, and it has been a privilege to […]
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What Van Gogh & Cape Town's water crisis can teach us about innovation

Most people believe that innovation requires creativity, and therefore that creativity is a pre-condition for innovation.  This has somewhat "mystified" innovation and sparked entire industries focused on creativity training, design thinking courses and all manner of "creative disruption" processes to help people "think outside the box" in an attempt to unleash the latent creative genius […]
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Levers, blueprints and roadmaps: 3 tips to combat "dark" metaphors

For those who follow me, it’s probably become apparent that I have a love for metaphors and analogies. Because much of what I do involves introducing others to new concepts, I find them to be useful “hooks”, linking the new idea to something familiar, thereby providing a “scaffold of mind” while understanding grows. Because of this, […]
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7 principles to help organisations resist the siren song of copying recipes

“You can't replicate the end point of an evolutionary process, which by its success has changed the context anyway.  However we can seek to copy the starting conditions and enable the emergence of new contextually unique successes that learn from it.” - Dave Snowden “… the fact is, if you don't know what makes things […]
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Befriending uncertainty

Having just returned from one journey into the unknown (visiting Sweden for the first time), I am preparing to enter the unknown once again as I pack for a residential Tavistock working conference that starts today.  Having been through this experience before, I am torn between excitement about what I will learn, and a profound sense […]
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Using Cynefin to make sense of preparing for the future of work

These past two weeks, I've had several conversations with executives and OD/L&D professionals who are trying to make sense of the complexities that automation initiatives are introducing into the workplace. We found it helpful to use Cynefin to understand some of these dynamics.  Now we know things tend not to fit neatly into the domains, […]
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Want resilience? Nurture diversity.

One of the learnings from complexity that I find particularly valuable in the workplace is the need for a “requisite diversity”.   Too little diversity limits the system’s adaptive capacity and too much diversity leads to a loss of coherence. One way to look at this is the tension between efficiency and centralisation e.g. instead […]
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Coaching leaders in the networked economy: reflecting on learnings from the A-N coaching course (LOL 1)

When you’re at sea and need to find your way, it is key to first locate yourself i.e. know your current position.  Before we had GPS, mariners did this by getting a “fix” - taking a compass heading on three widely spaced objects and determining where these headings intersect to get a “fix” on their […]
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Finding our way together

In a recent post, Jeff Goins describes that moment when the so-called “imposter syndrome” prevents a writer from publishing his work.  I could relate to that feeling … I often find myself agonising about whether or not something I’ve written is “worthy of publishing”.   Typically it sounds like “Who am I to write about this? I’m […]
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