Yearly Archives: 2007

The Cynefin Sense-making framework is a model we use very often to explain the use of business narrative and complexity in organisations.  I came across this great explanation of it by Shawn Callahan from Anecdote in Australia on the Cognitive Edge guest blog

Many people are familiar with the story of the Grameen bank.  Its founder (Mohammad Yunus) recently won a Nobel Peace prize for his pionering work in micro-credit and poverty alleviation.  In essence, what he did was to set up a self-regulating lending system.  Before the Grameen bank came into being it was virtually impossible for a poor person in Bangladesh to obtain credit.  Because of extremely poor debt repayment rates, banks found that the cost of lending made it not worth their while [...]

Recently on Chris Gibbons' program on Talk Radio 702, Jonathan Foster-Pedley of the UCT GSB, presented the results of a piece of research that was done at this university. Further exploration led me to this article, which makes tremendous sense in the current leadership landscape. The essence of the findings were that there are 7 "X-Factors" that necessary for success as entrepreneurial leader. I note that these factors were researched in the financial services sector, but it seems reasonable to apply them [...]

If there is one piece of information I wish more decision makers knew about, it is this one.  It's called Goodheart's Law, and it states: "The moment a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a measure" So simple, but yet so profound.  I can think of many failed initiatives that could've been avoided if whoever decided on measurement criteria knew this. I'll give you a few examples:  a South African television news program recently did an expose on the apparent [...]

Hands up those who have gone through a really solid exit interview process when leaving a company. Just what I thought ... very few of us have experienced a thorough, meaningful exit interview. Instead, many exit interviews are a mere "tick the box in the personnel file" formality rather than an opportunity to gain a rich perspective based on the anecdotes employees have to tell about the organisation. I need to be careful not to alienate the HR practitioners reading [...]

I facilitated a workshop recently that used the issue of Climate Change as an example of how to create invitations for change within teams, organisations and communities. We watched Al Gore's acclaimedAn Inconvenient Truth as a way of looking at how to go about creating an invitation for change. After the viewing, the group seemed to have some mixed reactions to the issue of climate change. I decided to share a story that Graeme tells about his daughter, Hannah. Driving one day to school, they [...]

In Peter Senge's landmark book, The 5th Discipline, he describes an example of feedback loops and the principle of delayed effects. The example is of the hot and cold tap in a shower. When you turn on the taps and realize that the water is too cold, you turn up the hot tap. You do not feel any change to the temperature - at least, not right away. This gives the illusion that your intervention to create a more luxurious cleansing experience has [...]