The prevailing wisdom in organizational change theory is that people always resist change. This thinking arose by observing people’s patterns of behavior within organizations engaged in change work, particularly the kind that had an impact on employees. But this...
Recently I had a chance to revisit decision-making when done in the context of thinking about your organization as a living system. Living systems behave differently and therefore, require us to reflect on the decision-making models we traditionally use. In nature,...
As individuals, we all have some healing to do as we emerge from the pandemic. The same is true of organizations. I’ve been reading Stuck?: Dealing With Organizational Trauma by Phillipe Bailleur, an organizational consultant who works with a living systems...
Nature can teach us a lot about the difference between facilitating organization and controlling a system. In fact, there seems to be hardly any controlling energy in nature at all. That’s because nature really doesn’t need a CEO at all. In nature, we...
I read an article recently from the Human Adaptation Institute. They created a Deep Time experiment where 15 volunteers spent 40 days in a cave beneath the Pyrenees with no natural light or clocks. I was fascinated with this article for two reasons. The first was I...
Randori is translated to the term “taking chaos ” and it’s the final sparring test before an Aikido student becomes a master. The student starts at one end of the dojo and is given the task to get to the other end. Standing in between the student and the goal...
