WaysFinding - Enabling coherent explore spaces

Boundaries, Complexity and adaptive leadership, Flow, Innovation, Leadership, Methods and practices, Resilience

I have written before about the need to embrace messy coherence or in more technical terms, coherent heterogeneity, a term I first encountered in the work of Dave Snowden. While most intuitively understand this need, how to achieve it practically remains elusive. We are emerging from a time where alignment and efficiency were pursued like […]

Navigate Complexity: Three Habits of Mind

Change, Complexity and adaptive leadership, Leadership

Too much of our understanding of complexity is intellectual. There is very little that embodies what complexity philosopher Edgar Morin would term “lived complexity”.

7 Differences between complex and complicated

Change, Complexity and adaptive leadership, Leadership, Resilience

Decision-makers commonly mistake complex systems for simply complicated ones and look for solutions without realizing that ‘learning to dance’ with a complex system is definitely different from ‘solving’ the problems arising from it. – Roberto Poli Many people believe that complexity is just higher order complicatedness i.e. that there is a continuum and that the difference […]

All that jazz ... making coherence coherent

agility, Complexity and adaptive leadership, Cynefin, Future of Work, Healthy organizations, Insights, Leadership, Metaphor, Resilience

One of the assertions I make quite often nowadays, is that we need to move from focusing on alignment, to focusing on coherence. I've found it interesting that out of all the potentially controversial statements I make, this one seems to generate an inordinate amount of questions and disagreement. It is understandable as this notion […]

Two Sensemaker® projects to understand opposites on the generational spectrum

Complexity and adaptive leadership, Leadership, Narrative, sensemaker

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 […]

Enabling adaptive space

agility, Complexity and adaptive leadership, Cynefin, Innovation, Leadership, Learning Out Loud

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 […]

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

Change, Complexity and adaptive leadership, Leadership, Uncategorized

“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 […]

What Van Gogh & Cape Town's water crisis can teach us about innovation

Complexity and adaptive leadership, Innovation, Leadership

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 […]

7 principles to help organisations resist the siren song of copying recipes

agility, Complexity and adaptive leadership, Innovation, Leadership, Metaphor, Resilience

“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 […]

Coaching leaders in the networked economy: reflecting on learnings from the A-N coaching course (LOL 1)

Complexity and adaptive leadership, Leadership, Learning Out Loud

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 […]

1 2 3 Next »

Blog - Category: Leadership