Innovation Has A Language Problem
Innovation has a language problem and unless we address it people will continue to dismiss or inflate its place in helping us create a world we want. #innovation
design
Innovation Is Like Everyday Life: Mostly Dull and Occasionally Dramatic
Boring and dull get a bad rap. Innovation, despite its popular image, is often boring and dull, but it also leads to fulfilment and that is an exciting outcome worth striving for. Boring is the day-to-day work that most of us do. It’s consistent, largely uneventful, and steady. It’s what allows us to create reliable …
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Whole System Learning and Evaluation
Persistent, dramatic changes are taking place that influence our work, communities, and personal lives and understanding what it means to learn, respond, and succeed will take changes in how we evaluate it all. A key feature of change in a complex system is that once its shifted, it never goes back; there’s no ‘undoing’ what’s …
Psychological Preparedness By Design
Systemic changes are happening all around us and the need for preparedness for an uncertain future has never been more salient. While operational plans and strategy are critical, psychological preparedness is just as important. Preparedness is anticipating certain kinds of events and outcomes tied to those events. Let’s look at environmental issues. For example, every …
Models for Clarity or Confusion: Are Your Sense-making Efforts Serving You?
Humans tell stories to each other through narrative, pictures, and data and models can help us make sense of things, but do they help us act? Or worse: do these models contribute to inertia? If you want to get a lot of traction on social media with a certain crowd, put up a model or …
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Work Design For People and Production Not Places
Asking if its better to have people work in a physical office together or from home is the wrong question if you’re not willing to look at the work itself. Since COVID-19 forced the world’s office workers home as their base for the better part of 36 months the world of commercial real-estate hasn’t been …
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Systems, Places and Spaces for Innovation
Creative ideas, new insights, and sustained action thrive in a community. As the world adapts to new ways of organizing and distributing our work, it’s worth considering what kind of spaces support this. I work with organizations seeking to innovate and rarely does the topic of space come up at the start of the conversation. …
Unlocking Organizational Change: Learning from the Cultural Phenomenon of Dutch Cycling
The famous Dutch cycling culture didn’t always exist; it was designed. A look at how this came to pass can help us to understand what it means to transform culture and keep it healthy. There are lessons to be learned whether you’re building a bike culture or transforming your organization. If you think of life …
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Are You Using Teaching Models or Action Models?
The confusion between whether something is used to teach or to guide underlies much of the dissatisfaction with the use of models to inform the way we work, learn, and behave. Let’s talk about systems and models — but stick with me, this is a practical and not just academic matter. I’ll start with a …
Significance and Making a Difference
Seth Godin’s recently published book, The Song of Significance, looks at how we organize our work and the message is profound if we’re ready to hear the song. I’ve written about Seth Godin many times in this space. Seth has written about the issues of work and education and making a difference in thousands of …