Not Working vs Wrong
Change is hard because our identities often depend on us being right, even when we are not. Understanding the myths we hold to can be a means to get past this and make real change and make it stick.
goals
Shifting Your Innovation Goals & Goalposts
What if the best way to accomplish a goal was to not have one or to keep it changing? That’s innovation. If you tightly define what you want, and succeed, all you get is exactly what you expected. You are limited by your own goal. – Robert Poynton I was recently speaking with one of my …
Putting our organizations on the couch
Creating change through rational planning only gets us halfway there. Looking inward will take us the rest of the journey. Remember the last time you participated in a meeting on organizational strategy that emphasized how people felt over what they thought about the proposed or current direction being taken? What about asking our colleagues about …
Complex problems and social learning
Adaptation, evolution, innovation, and growth all require that we gain new knowledge and apply it to our circumstances, or learn. While much focus in education is on how individuals attend, process and integrate information to create knowledge, it is the social part of learning that may best determine whether we simply add information to our …
Reframing change
Change is one of the few universal constants as things — people, planet, galaxy — are always in some state of movement, even if it’s imperceptible. Change is also widely discussed and desired, but often never realized in part because we’ve treated something nuanced as over-simplified; it’s time to change. For something so omnipresent in …
Exploding goals and their myths
Goal-directed language guides much of our social policy, investment and quests for innovation without much thought of what that means in practice. Looking at the way ideas start and where they carry us might offer us reasons to pause when fashioning goals and whether we need them at all. In a previous article, I discussed …
Smart goals or better systems?
If you’re working toward some sort of collective goals — as an organization, network or even as an individual — you’ve most likely been asked to use SMART goal setting to frame your task. While SMART is a popular tool for management consultants and scholars, does it make sense when you’re looking to make inroads …