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Your Dysfunctional Organisation Is Working Exactly as Designed
There is a sentence in systems literature that removes your right to complain about your own organisation. David Peter Stroh states it plainly in Systems Thinking for Social Change: systems are perfectly designed to achieve the results they are currently achieving. No matter how dysfunctional a system appears to be,
The Silvering
1 Arthur Wren had stopped looking at himself in mirrors around the time other people stopped looking at him. He placed that somewhere in his early sixties, well before Maggie got sick. So he could not blame it on the grief. It was an arrangement that suited everyone. He shaved
OKRs work brilliantly on complicated systems and fail on complex ones
Most organisations adopting OKRs today are using a tool built for engineering teams to solve problems that are not engineering problems. The framework works. It often works very well. It does not work everywhere. I spent the first part of my career as an internal auditor, and one of the
The hyperactive hive mind is an organisational design failure
A few years ago I wrote here that better leadership, on its own, will not save us. I was deep into Cal Newport's A World Without Email at the time, and the book had me convinced of one thing: most of what we treat as a leadership problem