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,
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
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
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
In 2024 we spent over three weeks clearing out my father's house. My father was, at the end of his life, a hoarder. Every cupboard was full. Every drawer was full. The cellar was so full that we didn’t even start emptying it, leaving it all to
Most government AI programmes are designed to fail. Not by intent, but by instinct. When a public organisation decides to build an AI initiative, it does what public organisations always do with new things they do not fully understand: it builds controls around them. Governance committees. Approval gates. Reporting requirements.
This is a fork of the excellent document written bij Michael Lopp, aka Rands in Repose, which you can find here. It is titled “How to … Rands”, and the credit for the idea and a lot of the content is entirely his. The article is a sort of introduction on
I love cursive writing. I always have. I was born into a generation that still had cursive writing drilled into them in school, and it is a great way to express your ideas, thoughts, and feelings at human speed. There is also a very tangible aspect to it: I have
Laurence Tratt wrote this interesting article on his blog two days ago. "Choosing what to read" as an article is more than worth your time reading it. It talks about making the best reading and opinion influencing choices in a world where we get overwhelmed with articles about
I'm getting deep into "A world without email", the new book by Cal Newport. Excellent read and in terms of insight eye-opening. If you want science supported insights into what works and does not in the workplace, this should be among the books you read
There's a lot going on around you ... what will you do about it? All around you, every single moment, "stuff" exists and "stuff" happens. I refer to it as "stuff" because it is undefined. And it is undefined because you haven'
Stream of Consciousness
Preface This post is inspired by an exchange with Nick Milo, who runs Linking Your Thinking. If you want to learn more about personal knowledge management (PKM) and more about PKM's within Obsidian, pay him a visit on his YouTube channel. Worth the time you'll invest.
Stream of Consciousness
Look at that computer I came from a time when internal auditors still worked with their hands ... writing cursive internal audit working papers, on paper, binding them all together with binding clips and being subject to a thorough or sometimes not so thorough manager working paper review. It was on
Stream of Consciousness
I am convinced there is something in an area of your life currently blocking you from moving forward in an intended direction. You may be aware of it or you may not, but I am almost certain it is there. This problem, this issue likely manifests itself as a sense
Stream of Consciousness
I am the proud father of two teenagers. And I see them suffering through the challenges of studying in the year(s) of COVID-19. In Flanders, we have defaulted to 50% in class and 50% at home learning. And it is during the at home learning that both my
Stream of Consciousness
I'm an avid podcast listener. One of these podcasts is Focused, hosted by David Sparks and Mike Schmitz. In the most recent episode they invited Ernie Svenson, a former lawyer turned entrepreneur. The entire episode was full of wisdom and I enjoyed listening to it. In one of
Stream of Consciousness
There are posts on this blog I’ve written in 20 minutes or even less. They are based on a straightforward idea that has formed in my mind. I merely have to copy those thoughts into coherent sentences to be able to publish. Those posts are few, but they exist.
Stream of Consciousness
Here's a pattern I've seen different people using, and I've used it myself: establishing multiple buckets for each of one's areas of responsibility and prioritising tasks within each of these buckets. At the face of it, it does make sense: we have
Stream of Consciousness
I was surprised, and not positively, when I realised that the level of awareness of the world our children have, is lower than the level we had at a similar age. This in spite of the many more sources of information available to them. To learn about the world, we
Stream of Consciousness
A personal productivity tool that integrates seamlessly with your way of working but gets out of the way when you need to get into the zone remains the Philosopher's Stone of personal management. We aspire to that optimisation by adopting tools which aim to help us manage our
Stream of Consciousness
You, like every one around you, have that one distinguishing characteristic. Something that defines you. Likely the first thing that people that know you will mention when they describe you to someone who has never met you. It is the anchor your friends have in their minds when thinking about
Stream of Consciousness
I dread those words. "Yes, but ..." indicates one of our suppliers, team members or colleagues both agreeing with a conclusion but denying responsibility for it. "Yes, but ..." is by its nature a defensive stance. It indicates entrenched interests, a hidden agenda. It does not bode well
Stream of Consciousness
The pandemic the world has been confronted with the past year has almost no upsides. Too many people have died and more will die before we get on top of this. But there are lessons to be learned from the experiences during the pandemic. These lessons provide valuable insights into