Among the great challenges of compexity and disruption is knowing what to look at and how to make sense of what you see. Without training your senses, you may be going in blind. The idea of seeing things might be natural, but it still requires work. Many natural things require our effort, which is why […]
The Strategy Blindness Problem: Training Your Senses for What Counts Read More »
It’s super easy to create digital content now, but that means we’re drowning in low-quality stuff. Everyone’s glued to their devices, scanning boring, formulaic articles. There’s way too much generic content out there, leaving us feeling overwhelmed and disconnected. We need originality to think and engage meaningfully, or we’ll just keep swiping.
Are We Producing Ourselves Into Oblivion? Read More »
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
Whole System Learning and Evaluation Read More »
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
Models for Clarity or Confusion: Are Your Sense-making Efforts Serving You? Read More »
Knowing what you have influence over, what you don’t, and what’s in between can be the difference in creating possibility and hope or despair and confusion. The term sphere of influence was coined to refer to nation’s geopolitical power and used as a guide to frame a given country’s social, economic, political and military strategy.
Designing for Your Spheres of Influence Read More »
Saying something is complex was once an admission we didn’t have expertise, now it’s a cover for not committing to something. What does it mean when we undermine the meaningfulness of the term complexity? If you were involved in business operations or social innovation 15 years ago, you might remember when people rarely used “complex”
When Did Complexity Change Its Meaning? Read More »
In this final installment on Principles Focused Evaluation, we look at how to connect our data with our designs. If I have principles and don’t follow them, do I have them at all? This question is something that Principles Focused Evaluation can help us to answer. It’s at the core of our work. The vehicle
Design For Principles Read More »
Principled or values-driven approaches to strategy only have value when we can put them into practice. In this latest post in our series on Principles-Focused Evaluation, we look at the nuts and bolts of putting principles into practice. It is a lot easier to speak of principles and values than to live by them. I
Principles in Action Read More »
Data-driven strategy and decision-making are only as good as the processes we have to gather, synthesize and use to inform action. I am a strong advocate for using data to inform decisions. Good quality data, appropriately gathered and focused, can reveal patterns that save time, money, and even lives. But data is also another method
The Fear and Folly of Data Read More »
Whether it is our organizations, teams or ourselves we need to heal. What’s made this such a complicated challenge is that we must do this as individuals and groups. We also must do this by having shared and unique experiences. This is the design challenge for our age. There’s little need to point out our
Organizational Healing By Design Read More »
