Five-Factors of Work Well-Being
Promote and nurture well-being at work with five factors built into the design of your operations and your organizational culture.
organizational psychology
Emotional Honesty in Designing Change
Innovation is emotional work and it’s time to connect our feelings and thoughts to fuel our change efforts and actions. I recently read an interview between Yancey Strickler and Clare Farrell, co-founder of The Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement that attracted my attention. The interview was part of Strickler’s Ideaspace podcast and titled ‘from hope to …
Innovation for the Real World
Why does most of what we read about innovation resemble very little of what our work life actually looks like? It is rare to find a profile of an innovation initiative that speaks to the everyday experiences of business, government, healthcare, or non-profit life. Instead, we read cases where there was leadership, time, focus, drive …
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.
Innovation Psychology
Highlights on innovation psychology inspired by the Censemaking Newsletter. Today we dive a little further into some of the headlines from our latest newsletter, recapping some stories on the psychology of innovation that might be of interest to you. Change Your Mind, Change your Behaviour McKinsey & Co recently published a new report on the role of …
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 …
Genetic engineering for your brand
DNA doesn’t predetermine our future as biological beings, but it does powerfully influence it. Some have applied the concept of ‘DNA’ to a company or organization, in the same way, it’s applied to biological organisms. Firms like PWC have been at the forefront of this approach, developing organizational DNA assessments and outlining the principles that shape the DNA of an …
Learning fails in bad systems
Enormous energy is spent on developing strategies to accomplish things with comparatively little paid to the systems that they are being deployed in. A good strategy works by design, and that means designing systems that improve the likelihood of their success rather than fight against them and this is no truer than in the effort …
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 …
A Beautiful Idea
Is what you do, where you work, or how you organize, beautiful? Among the many words used to describe our work lives the most neglected and maybe necessary might be described that one word: it’s time to take it seriously. For those working in design one of the biggest challenges is getting people to understand that …