The CEO of a retail chain wanted his leadership team to learn how to have tough business conversations. Too many issues were being buried, he said. Team members needed to bring their issues to the table and learn how to resolve them. He asked me to design a three-hour team-building workshop. I began the workshop …
What are the characteristics of high performing teams? This tool, drawn from the book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni, provides you a quick look at what high performing teams really do. High Performing Teams Here are the five characteristics of highly effective teams: Attention to results: Team members regularly monitor their …
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Conflicting mental models often occur. The result is critical systems thinking blind spots. “I’ve got two vice presidents, both very good at what they do, who just can’t get along,” the executive director of a non-profit agency told us. “I spend an inordinate time mediating their conflicts. What can I do?” she asked. When we …
Here are more examples that may help you see the benefits of systems thinking. When the Titanic set sail from England, the engineers who designed the watertight bulkheads assumed that the hull would never be breached across multiple compartments below the waterline. This led to the popular illusion that the Titanic was unsinkable. Thus, for …
Systems thinking means having the ability to view things in different time scales simultaneously and thus resolving the paradoxes between them. Here are some systems thinking examples. We were asked to facilitate the transformation of a blighted urban neighborhood. We invited a number of “experts” to offer their views to a panel of residents. A …
When you use systems thinking in business, you discover patterns of assumptions that may have been invisible. We refer to these as “frames.” In the field of cognitive science, it’s well understood that frames influence how people think about a particular issue or problem. In the world of politics, there’s a conservative frame (“We need …
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Watching leaders and managers in action, I’ve observed that there are three major challenges to maintaining a systems perspective. First, because we live in an era of accelerating change, it’s easy to become distracted by the daily influx of events and issues – “to spend 24 hours a day fighting fires,” as the vice president …
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Organizations are constantly faced with the need to rethink, redesign, restructure, or reduce costs to remain competitive. However, many organizations find it challenging to tackle business process improvement. It is often a domino effect; changing business practices in one area may affect numerous other processes across the organization. Add in all of the stakeholders who …
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This tool describes an eight step process improvement plan. Each step is defined, along with hints for ensuring quality of execution in each phase. This is an invaluable tool for leaders who want to improve a business process and assure themselves of success from planning through implementation. Hint: This tool is best used in conjunction …
I work with a lot of Boards of Directors for public agencies, corporations, nonprofits. Typically, my focus is on helping these Board develop a high-level performance scorecard that the Board can rely on for measuring the organization’s performance. This, in turn, will accelerate the organization to attain higher levels of performance. The important thing about …
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