Leading Change for Complex Projects
I’ve been facilitating lots of groups through complex challenges recently – here are some lessons to complement those in my book, Big Little Shifts, which is all about this topic, (you can obtain a copy here). I am currently seeing lots of people experiencing high degrees of ongoing change at present – restructures, new product and service offerings, technological changes, ...
5 ways to know if your team trusts you
I’ve worked within organisations where trust in the senior leadership seemed to have broken down. In fact, one senior employee whom I talked with said that, in their organisation, the lost trust was irredeemable. That’s a huge prediction and maybe a bit dramatic. Without a doubt, your ‘trust bank’ goes up and down over time ...
How we become regenerative and sustainable is important
The recent IPCC report last week has brought home that all organisations, all businesses, and all individuals, for that matter, need to think about how they can respond to our ecological and climate crisis. Some of this response will be in terms of how we lead people in our organisations, and some of it needs to be ...
The people with the problem are the problem – and the solution.
I recently sat through yet another conversation all about WHAT we have to change. This drives me a bit crazy because we actually don’t know much about HOW to change. Maybe the focus on WHAT is because we believe that purely technological approaches are capable of solving the ecological and climate crises that we are ...
The choice not to defer
Over the Christmas break, I leapt at the opportunity to read a HUGE book (The Dawn of Everything: a new history of humanity), which I purchased over 12 months ago. David Graeber (Professor of Anthropology and London School of Economics) and David Wengrow (Professor of Comparative Archaeology at University College London) author it. Primarily, the ...
Leading change? Your energy matters.
I get up every morning, and I have a smile on my face. It’s a new day of life! I just enjoy it and I make a point of laughing when things go wrong. Not that I don’t care that things have not gone quite the way we expected; I do care a great deal. ...
Generating energy and commitment for change
“Each morning I arrive at work, I feel I haven’t progressed anything substantial. The strategic commitments I made remain unattended as I keep addressing day-to-day operational issues. My team is tired, and we are short-staffed. I can’t find appropriate people to replace staff that are leaving. Existing staff can’t possibly cover the amount of work ...
Systemic Burnout and Overwork
My work brings me into contact with a lot of senior managers, and over the past three months I’ve been working with a number of them across different organisations. There is a common and constant conversation about senior managers feeling exhausted, and expressing concern for their team members’ energy levels too. It seems that we ...
Influencing culture is not about ‘pulling levers’!
We are mid-way through an assignment to assist a client organisation in positively influencing its organisational culture. Our methodology has developed over 20 years and is underpinned by systems thinking and complexity combined with psychology. If there is one thing I have learned, despite all the rhetoric, it’s that there are no levers that can ...
Code Red Opportunities
Recently I was asked to present a keynote at the Public Libraries SA Conference on the hot topic of the climate crisis. This is a topic that has the potential to be depressing and disheartening, and I wanted to be invited to talk again, so I didn’t want to send the entire audience into therapy. ...