List

Decision making

  • Have your Big White Board of Distractions in front of you. Keep your list very fresh. Then, execute the strategy.

    If you want to execute a strategy, you want to keep cool and move inexorably forward, and if you think […]

  • Where are all these people coming from for the meeting? Their previous, unrelated meetings have the key for yours

    “Priming’ is an old concept. It means you can influence events by exposing people to subtle messages, colours, perhaps emotions […]

  • The Stopping Rule in organizations, where the meaning of life may be 37

    In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, ‘the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, […]

  • There are always trade-offs. If you or your people have a plan, a great plan, without trade-offs in, it’s not a good plan.

    You always have the trade-off between doing X, and not doing it at all. There will be a cost of […]

  • The pilgrimage to the top of the Leadership Mountain to ask for permission, blessings and a bit of gratification.

    Scenario 1: The Leadership Team/top Management Team is in high control mode. They feel they need to make many kinds […]

  • Small steps, small wins against an accelerated reality. Sensible strategy or a suicidal note?

    ‘I am convinced that a well thought out “small wins approach” is the premier path to effective strategy implementation, and […]

  • The logic of speed yoga, and organizational clocks

    Have you heard of speed yoga? Me neither. Although Mr Google points to some YouTube videos that in fact are […]

  • In empowerment terms, be careful what you are asking for, you might get it.

    The project team has been complaining for a long time of their lack of empowerment. They have a lot of […]

  • The problem with too many decisions pushed up to the top of the organization, usually lies with those at the top who complain most

    When too many decisions are pushed upwards in the organization, and the top layers of leadership complain about it, often […]

  • Don’t go to Abilene. Nobody wants to.

    Jerry B Harvey’s 1974 article “The Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement’, contains this vignette. On a hot afternoon visiting […]

  • Trends, predictions and hunches, in the art of avoiding more mistakes than others.

    We often tend to mistake these in organizations Trends: See, hear and feel what is going on, and find patterns […]

  • Reacting on spot, and responding in agility mode can be engineered and role-modelled.

    Organizations need a Rapid Reaction Force. OK, unless you are in the military, it does not mean military fatigue uniforms […]

  • ‘Problem Three’ appears when we treat complexity with more complexity. Many organizations breed it. The UK NHS is caught in it.

    At some point of the organization’s growth, complexity kicks in. Before that threshold, you had two problems: managing growth and […]

  • Critical Thinking is up in the list of skills in the 2020 Davos shopping list. If anything, I have a problem with the date. The skill gap is now, well and alive

    A report on the Future of Jobs by the World Economic Forum compares the skills priorities of 2015 with the […]

  • ‘There is nothing I can do’ must be fought before it becomes collective belief.

    Feeling trapped, is at the core of some aspects of one’s mental health, and also organizational distress. The deep awareness […]

  • The Einstein Solution: on the curious phenomenon of how the challenges left on the desk before the break have not gone away.

    Welcome back to a New Year and its rituals of resolutions, reviews and fresh starts. For some, and I hope […]

  • Efficiency, Efficacy and Effectiveness: the triplets of Management (and the risk of dating the wrong sister)

    Many restructuring efforts, perhaps process re-engineering (whether these days you call them like this or not) and a great deal […]

  • ‘A problem with decision making’ is almost never a problem with making decisions. Here are 3 scenarios.

    Many organizations claim that they have a problem with decision making. Maybe, or maybe not. There are at least three […]

  • Stuck is the worse status. Worse than being wrong.

    You are stuck when confronted with dilemmas. Maybe  contradictory business decisions, or maybe the need to chose between two evils. […]

  • “There are two types of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data sets”

    What type are you? How our mental models work is part of the Minimal Introspection, something we tend to overlook, […]

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      Daily Thoughts

    September 27th, 2023

    Redefining Talent Wealth

    The war on talent McKinsey consultants started it with a book of the same title. By focusing on what it […]
    September 8th, 2023

    What I Learnt From The Monks: A Little Anthropology Of Leadership And Space On One Page

    My friends, monks of a Benedictine monastery in the Highlands, Scotland, spend most of the time in silence. I mean, […]
    August 23rd, 2023

    Can We Rescue DEI From Its Trap (The Label)?

    Most of the problems and challenges in organizations, together with most of the solutions, are behavioural in nature. It’s about […]
    August 10th, 2023

    Restructuring to force collaboration, is likely to create more anxiety than collaboration. Structural solutions for behavioural problems hardly work.

    Sometimes restructuring is done with the intention of solving a collaboration problem. ´A people´ don’t talk to ´B people´; if […]
    July 18th, 2023

    The ‘Impossible To Disagree With’ School Of Management

    ‘Good leaders have empathy, respect employees and set the example. If you want to change things, you need to have […]
    June 29th, 2023

    Large scale change is not small scale change repeated many times. Small wins repeated are lots of small wins.

    Large scale change, as a series of cascading small scale interventions (often under the philosophy of ‘small wins’) has dominated […]
    June 6th, 2023

    Culture change is not long and difficult. But we make it so…

    I suppose the question is how long is long and how difficult is difficult? In general, business and organizational consulting have […]
    May 19th, 2023

    Value is an overused term in business and, as such, it’s becoming meaningless

    Value, as usually used, means transactional monetary value. Usually it doesn’t mean intrinsic value, or value per se. For example, […]
    May 4th, 2023

    The importance of ‘critical thinking.’ Your own critical thinking is more effective at making your workplace better than any generic employee survey.

    Build your own Employee Engagement argument for free. You can’t go wrong. Here are three baskets full of concepts: Basket […]
    April 21st, 2023

    ´Busy-Ness’ Is A Trap

    I went to a big conference where I was introduced by the chairman like this: “Welcome everybody. Lovely to have […]
    April 14th, 2023

    Training and culture change. The love affair that ends in tears.

    It seems to be very hard for people to get away from the idea that if we just put individuals […]
    April 11th, 2023

    Teamocracies and Networkracies have different citizens: in-Habitants in team-work, riders in net-work

    The old view of the organization is something close to the old concept of a medieval city, where citizenship was […]
    April 5th, 2023

    3 Ways To Get Approval From Your CEO Or Your Leadership Team

    Way number 1: My team has developed these three options, A, B and C. Which one do you want us […]
    March 29th, 2023

    A Cheat Sheet To Create A Social Movement Tip = to shape organizational culture since both are the same.

    Mobilizing people. This is another of the Holy Grails (how many have I said we have?) in management. Whether you […]
    March 16th, 2023

    Critical Thinking Self-Test: A 10 Point Health Check For Your Organization And Yourself. If any of these are a good picture of your organization, you need to put ‘critical thinking’ in the water supply.

    Test yourself, and your organization. Do any of these apply? Doing lots, too fast without thinking. High adrenaline, not sure […]
    March 9th, 2023

    A culture of safety or a culture of training in safety?

    Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm. Safety is at the core of many industries. Significant budgets are allocated […]
    March 2nd, 2023

    Empowerment is an output. If you can visualize it, you can craft it.

    The real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’? Employee […]
    February 24th, 2023

    A simple question will jumpstart your organization into change. It will also save you from months of pain spent reorganizing your people and teams.

    The following line will short-cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, and any situation in which Peter, […]
    February 20th, 2023

    Lead Via Peer-To-Peer Networks – If you don’t lead via peer-to-peer networks, you’re only driving your car in first gear.

    Peer-to-peer work, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is the […]
    February 7th, 2023

    Write a script, not a strategic plan

    If you care about the journey and the place, you need a story. If you have a good, compelling one, […]
    January 26th, 2023

    3 self-sabotaging mechanisms in organizations

    Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage. These are 3 self-sabotage systems to […]
    January 10th, 2023

    Who should be involved in culture change? All inclusive versus going where the energy is.

    Many times, in my consulting work, I find myself facing a dilemma: Do I involve many people on the client’s […]
    December 23rd, 2022

    Tell what won’t change – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

    In any change programme that any organization wants to start, they will start by thinking of the things that they […]
    December 16th, 2022

    Scale It – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

    When creating effective change in any organization, there are 40 rules that, in my experience, are the key between success […]
    December 5th, 2022

    Assets & Strengths Base – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

    For more than 30 years I have been involved in ‘change’ in organizations. Again and again, some fundamental principles, and often […]
    November 25th, 2022

    Campaign It… is 1 of my 40 rules of change

    When you filter out the noise, when you try to extract the core, the fundamentals, those ‘universal rules’ of change […]
    October 31st, 2022

    Hybrid or not hybrid? That’s not the question…

    Culture is the new workplace If you want to have a conversation about the future of work, the nature of […]
    October 24th, 2022

    ‘Powered by Viral Change™’: A Social Transformation Platform for the organization of the 21st Century

    When we started to work on Viral Change™, as a way to create large scale behavioural and cultural change, and […]
    October 14th, 2022

    Corporate tribes, intellectual ghettos and open window policies

    We talk a lot about silos in organizations usually in the context of Business Units or divisions. But these are not […]
    October 7th, 2022

    Peer Networks are the strongest force of action inside the organization

    Peer-to-peer works, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is […]