Category: change
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Autonomy, Ownership, Competence and Confidence
A while back I write a post on my definition of what great leadership should really be all about, and I described this as high-reaching informality. High-reaching because great leaders are ambitious, exceptional at getting the best out of their people, and encouraging their teams to think bigger and aim higher. Informal because this supports open…
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Make the right path the easy path
I was reminded of the quote that I’ve used for the title of this post at a recent workshop with a public sector body. I was talking about the book ‘Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy is Delivery‘ which is a wonderful account of the early years of the UK Government Digital Service and…
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On technology acceptance models
One of the critical aspects of navigating technological change effectively is understanding more about how users accept and adopt new technologies. For leaders trying to drive technology acceptance and adoption, and to introduce new ways of working within organisations, or consultants and strategists looking to understand changing contexts and capabilities, it can be really useful…
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Action, instability and safe to fail
I enoyed reading Doug Garnett’s thoughts on action and instability (courtesy JP Castlin). The premis of Doug’s piece is that, in his words, ‘certain actions in business are so unstable that even tiny errors do tremendous harm’: ‘Businesses tend to think of stability and instability in broad terms, summarized in questions like “is my business…
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Balancing comfort and urgency in transformation
I’ve long been a fan of Dr Ronald Heifetz’s (of the Center For Public Leadership at Harvard University) delineation between what he frames as ‘technical change’ and ‘adaptive change’. In his book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership and elsewhere he describes how technical change is typically that which relates to more tangible or visible things…
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The power of common knowledge in driving change
I liked Ian Leslie’s review (from a few years ago) of the book Rational Ritual, by Michael Suk-Young Chwe, which focuses on an intriguing aspect of ‘common knowledge’ which Ian summarises thus: ‘For everyone to know something is not enough to force change; what matters is that everyone knows that everyone knows’. There’s an important…
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High-reaching informality
The best leaders that I’ve worked with and for have typically all had one characteristic in common – what you might call a ‘high-reaching informality’. High-reaching: what I mean by this is that great leaders get the best out of their people by encouraging their teams to think bigger, think harder, aim higher, be more…
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What shockwave jams tell us about getting stuff done
Ever been driving along a busy road with the traffic flowing along nicely and then for no apparent reason and with no obvious obstacles or changes in road conditions it starts to jam up? We’ve all been there. Believe it or not these types of traffic jams have a name – shockwave jams – referring…
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Red Teaming
I was in a client workshop last week and we were discussing the benefits of having an organisational culture and environment that encourages comfort with dissent. Many teams struggle with conflict but the ability to healthily disagree with each other is one of the foundations of psychological safety and high-performing teams. One of Amy Edmonsdon’s…
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Traffic lights and roundabouts
There was a lovely analogy that Alison Orsi used in the latest Google Firestarters episode (podcast links here) in which she talks about the secrets of effective marketing transformation. The analogy relates to how important it is for leaders to empower teams to experiment, but for them to test and learn within ‘safe to fail’…