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 […]

Why we suck at "solving wicked problems"

Change, Complexity and adaptive leadership, Cynefin, Metaphor, Uncategorized

Problems: Wicked, complex, intractable, or adaptive … whatever we choose to call them, we seem to suck at solving them and we often get profoundly overwhelmed and stuck. I believe the reason for this is hidden in the language I used in the title and previous sentence (… and no it's not the adjectives ... […]

The peripheral; extravagance; and paradox: Whistler reflections by Renée Koch

agility, Complexity and adaptive leadership, General musings, Guest blogs, Innovation, Metaphor

I asked my friend Renée Koch, who was a faculty member at the Whistler Retreat earlier this year, to contribute a guest blog reflecting on her experience and learning at the retreat and beyond. I love her focus on the peripheral; extravagance; and paradox. What struck me is how the notion of extravagance again challenges […]

Learnings from Whistler: Scaffolding emergence

agility, Complexity and adaptive leadership, Cynefin, Insights, Learning Out Loud, Metaphor, Resilience

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 […]

Levers, blueprints and roadmaps: 3 tips to combat "dark" metaphors

Change, Complexity and adaptive leadership, culture, Metaphor, Metaphorology

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, […]

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 […]

Want resilience? Nurture diversity.

Complexity and adaptive leadership, culture, Metaphor, Metaphorology, Resilience

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 […]

If you want to innovate, don't say so

agility, Cynefin, Metaphor, Methods and practices, Narrative, Teams

"Innovation is not so much about having ideas as it is about making connections" Harold Jarche Last week I had the opportunity to facilitate a week-long "innovation sprint" for Agile 42, an international agile coaching company. After recovering from my time spent facilitating 39 other facilitators (on my own!) I finally had time to reflect on […]

On mayonnaise and survival

agility, Complexity and adaptive leadership, culture, Metaphor, Resilience

I recently attended the 4th International Conference for Responsible Leadership, hosted at Gibs by the Albert Luthuli Centre for Responsible Leadership (University of Pretoria). One of the highlights was getting the chance to facilitate a panel discussion on Complexity Leadership in South Africa with a group of highly respected local and international academics. Another was […]

Jungle vs Zoo - Reflections on change and resilience

Change, Complexity and adaptive leadership, culture, Healthy organizations, Innovation, Leadership, Metaphor, Resilience

In my previous post I introduced the analogy of a jungle vs a zoo to help us make sense of the complex contexts we face and the often ordered organisational structures and processes we tend to create. In this post I want to explore this analogy further and look specifically at how change and resilience from the […]

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Blog - Category: Metaphor