Maintain diversity and redundancy (Building resilience: Principle 1)

Complexity and adaptive leadership, culture, Leadership, Resilience

"Systems with many different components (e.g. species, actors, or sources of knowledge) are generally more resilient than systems with few components. Redundancy provides 'insurance' within a system by allowing some components to compensate for the loss or failure of others. Redundancy is even more valuable if the components providing the redundancy also react differently to […]

Building resilience: what organisations can learn from social ecologists

agility, Change, Complexity and adaptive leadership

I have been blessed with a very diverse network, which includes among others many renowned thinkers and scientists in the field of social-ecological systems. I am therefore exposed to thinking that I would otherwise not gain easy access to. Most of my work happens in the corporate world (although I do get to play with scientists […]

What I believe to be true about organisational culture

Complexity and adaptive leadership, Narrative

A client asked me to write down some thoughts about a complexity based approach to culture. I thought I'd go ahead and publish some of my initial thoughts here as well. (I've woven together my own ideas with those of Dave Snowden & Dr Chene Swart - so much credit to them!) Thinking about culture from a […]

Reflections on the 'edginess' of change

agility, Change, Complexity and adaptive leadership, Metaphor

I was part of a "real play" scenario (you play yourself i.e. how would you respond in the scenario, vs playing a role) the other day, to demonstrate a wonderful coaching modality called ORSC. The scenario we were playing out was one of a large and established insurer who had aquired a small, agile and innovative […]

Useful: Dave Snowden on resilience

Change, Complexity and adaptive leadership

While preparing a proposal for a series of leadership workshops on resilience, I came across this list of seven characteristics of resilience in an older post by Dave Snowden: They've probably changed, but I thought they were useful nonetheless. Original text in italics. For a system to be resilient it must be capable of dynamic re-organisation […]

Complexity, snake-oil and silver bullets

Complexity and adaptive leadership, Cynefin

I just returned from a trip to London to experience the updated 4-day Cognitive Edge accreditation training and to meet some of the CE'rs I've known virtually for many years (like Michael Cheveldave and Peter Stanbridge) face to face. Several new ideas were introduced, probably the biggest one being the renaming of the simple domain of […]