Articles
STAY CONNECTED AND SIGNUP TO RECEIVE INSIGHT updates
To be, or not to be, our best selves?
One of the greatest gifts of growing up in a Western culture is the emphasis placed on what Jung called individuation. While our identity is partially defined by our gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnic group, age, wealth, class, and other determinants, we are ultimately unique individuals.
As we progress through life and explore the deep questions of who we are, how we got here, why we’re here and what’s going to happen when we pass on, our culture calls on us to find our own conclusions—to become an individual. For me, this is what the lifelong journey of personal mastery is all about.(more…)
Springboard: It’s Not Luck
The latest in our series that uses the ‘book review’ format as a springboard into a wider conversation about the world of work—and how to do it better.
It’s Not Luck by Eli Goldratt
____________________________
As Yogi Berra once said, ‘When you come to the fork in the road, take it!’ We’ve all faced binary choices: opting for X means you can’t also do Y. How to decide? Confronted with a dilemma, it may feel good to trust our gut but it’s hard to avoid all our subconscious biases. Wouldn’t it be better to have some mental tools that help us think through key decisions? (more…)
Shut up and listen
Have you ever left a meeting satisfied your opinion was fully understood and accepted, only to discover later that the other person ‘heard’ something completely different? Sometimes it’s deliberate—a lack of transparency or political expediency. More often the problem is an absence of true communication. Unfortunately, most of the time we never get the feedback that tells us we’ve been misunderstood—or that we ourselves misunderstood. And we plough on, going down two diverging paths.
Western culture tends to privilege objective fact over subjective experience. In business, we can end up mistaking the spreadsheet for the people and the Gantt chart for how work is actually done. People are not simply a collection of objects following a set of deterministic rules to achieve a predefined outcome. Whenever people interact with an idea, a field is created—invisible like a magnetic field, but no less real. We perhaps only lack the ‘iron filings’ to see its effects. The quality of the field is dependent on the quality of the listening that happens between the parties. (more…)
Springboard: A Beautiful Constraint
In this series, I share some books that have inspired me recently using the ‘book review’ format as a springboard into a wider conversation about the world of work—and how to do it better.
A Beautiful Constraint by Adam Morgan & Mark Barden
____________________________
I’ve been studying constraints and consulting in them for the last twenty years so was eager to see what I might learn from the authors, a pair of marketing consultants whose firm, Eat Big Fish, specialises in breakthrough strategies. My own background in industrial engineering and Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints gives me a very rich, but quite precise, understanding of what is meant by the oft-used ‘constraint’ word. I found the authors’ take on constraints to be highly relevant and reaffirmation that ‘the obstacle is the way’ to deep innovation.(more…)
More Than Just Work
In this new series of articles, I’d like to share some of the books that have stood out for me recently. I’ll use the ‘book review’ format loosely as a springboard into a wider conversation about the world of work—and how to do it better.
Each of the books we’ll look at has contributed to my ongoing learning and deeper understanding of how I move forward in my mission to bring more justice to work. In some ways, reading them has been like a cold shower—painful, shocking even, but refreshing.(more…)
Starting the journey
What’s your mental map of the world? Do you imagine countries as jagged shapes, in pastel colours with printed names? Or do you envisage a panoply of people and landscapes? Do you hear the local music and language, and smell the food? And is your picture based on books and movies, or firsthand experience?
Europeans often criticise Americans for mixing up, say, Slovenia and Slovakia. But how many of those critics could correctly name and label all the US states?* Perhaps, though, you’re a seasoned traveller, with a Google-map brain. Yet how would you fare on French literature? Or astronomy? Or the Icelandic legal system?
We’re all trapped in our own bubbles. We know this from the polarised reaction to world events, such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. But how often do we consider that all our colleagues or clients also carry around different mental maps of how things should be done?
