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Smart goals or better systems?
Posted on July 19, 2017 2 Comments
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 […]
Decoupling creators from their creations
Posted on June 1, 2017 Leave a Comment
The world is transformed by creators — the artists, the innovators, the leaders — and their creations are what propel change and stand in the way of it. Change can be hard and its made all the more so when we fail to decouple the creator from the created, inviting resistance rather than enticing better creations. […]
Time. Care. Attention.
Posted on May 17, 2017 2 Comments
A read through a typical management or personal improvement feed will reveal near infinite recommendations for steps you can take to improve your organization or self. Three words tend to be absent from this content stream and they are what take seemingly simple recommendations and navigate them through complexity: time, care, and attention. Embedded within the torrent […]
Jaded: Whether You Are a Plant or a Stone Makes All the Difference
Posted on May 11, 2017 Leave a Comment
An attempt to innovate – do something new to produce value — is always fraught with risk and a high likelihood that things won’t go as planned, which can leave people jaded toward future efforts. Whether that metaphor of jade is one of a rock (static) or a plant (growth) makes all the difference. Innovation is hot. […]
Seeking simplicity among complexity? Go Dutch!
Posted on April 7, 2017 2 Comments
In a world awash in content and the resulting complexity that comes when it all intersects the viable options for how to manage it remain few. The Dutch De Stijl art and design movement might offer some lessons on dealing with complexity that we can apply beyond products to creating beautiful, functional, and effective services, […]
Foreseeing the Unpossible
Posted on December 2, 2016
Change may be the only constant and, beyond wet babies, few of us welcome it. Foresight is about looking ahead to what change(s) might be coming to help us prepare, but that doesn’t help much if we don’t know where we are right now. Last night I had a wonderful conversation with some foresighting peers, […]
Unpossible
Posted on November 21, 2016 3 Comments
‘Post-truth’ was named the Oxford Dictionary word of the year. No fitting word reflects the strangeness of 2016 with the exception of unpossible, a word I made up and in a post-truth world might as well be as legitimate as many of the arguments being made about the most important things of the day, which […]
Lost together
Posted on July 13, 2016
Doing new things to create social value means going into the great unknown, yet our fear of being lost need not prevent us from innovating, wisely and sustainably. Instead of being lost alone, we can be lost together. I’ve heard it all so many times before It’s all a dream to me now A dream to […]
Innovation Framing
Posted on May 17, 2016
Innovation is easier to say than to do. One of the reasons is that a new idea needs to fit within a mindset or frame that is accustomed to seeing the way things are, not what they could be, and its in changing this frame that innovators might find their greatest obstacles and opportunities. Innovation, its […]
Confusing change-making with actual change
Posted on May 3, 2016 3 Comments
Change-making is the process of transformation and not to be confused with the transformed outcome that results from such a process. We confuse the two at our peril. “We are changing the world” is a rallying cry from many individuals and organizations working in social innovation and entrepreneurship which is both a truth and untruth at the […]
