All posts by CADirector

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Our Ideas Practice

Poised resourcefulness – seeking the way forward

I have been thinking and writing about shifts in the way I go about my work. This is part of trying to understand how leaders and managers can develop a different kind of resourcefulness as they work within ongoing processes and emerging situations. Last week this quote from Margaret Wheatley popped up on Twitter. Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole. Benjamin Taylor immediately responded by saying:  … see now – this is inspiring and helpful – yes, absolutely go and explore different …

Our Ideas

Shifting orientations and multiple ways of knowing

On Being Stuck For a couple of weeks now I’ve been trying to write something. More to the point I’ve been feeling a need to write something on new ideas about learning and knowing. But every time I sit down to do so – nothing really comes. Certainly not anything that causes me to say “Ah, that’s it.” Rather, to the contrary, I keep saying (to myself), “No, that’s not it!”. At the same time I have been trawling back through a range of practices and “practical theories” that I’m interested in or that I know have influenced the way …

Our Ideas

Improvise your way forward – especially when you get stuck!

Mostly, when they get stuck, leaders and managers in organisations simply want to come to grips with the situation, improvise and gradually find a way forward. Too frequently, though, they are led to believe, particularly in more formal training programmes or by “expert” consultancies, that the only way to get unstuck is through extensive data-gathering as part of an evidence driven approach. And yet the way we typically go about resolving on next steps and adaptive moves is generally  to trust our intuition, improvise and pay attention to what happens next. We do this because often in practice it turns …

Leaders need to see from multiple perspectives
Organisational Structure

Leaders need to see from multiple perspectives

 Complexity and Control Jordan Greenhall recently used an interesting metaphor for why we have ended up with hierarchical organisations and leaders who operate from control-based structures in order to manage complexity.  I’ll quote it in fully here because I doubt I could express it any better:

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