If you don’t feel like reading, you can watch my video by clicking here.
When you’re feeling the overwhelm, the pressure, and you need a way to make projects run better in your organisation…who do you turn to?
Matthew MConaughey of course!
Hang with me here – check out the below, McConaughey from an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast, with my emphasis:
Read more…This time I go through a scene from the TV show Andor…so it’s better to watch me do this on video. To do that, click here.
And if you can’t…I’ll go through it now.
Have you seen the show Andor? I’ll bet you didn’t know there’s a lesson in there about organisational structure!
The show is part of the Star Wars pantheon, but it’s different. Deeper, and goes right into the effects of colonisation, imperialism and how that can turn individuals.
And…we get to see what’s called the Imperial Security Bureau in action, which we can picture as an Executive Team of an organisation. Here they are:
The scene I go through is a meeting of the ‘Supervisors’, who are the equivalent to Executives, with the boss being Major Partagaz who we might say is the CEO.
Read more…Prefer to watch rather than read? Click here to watch the video – 4 mins, with captions.
Air Traffic Control has it’s act together. Because if it doesn’t, things go wrong. Really wrong.
Here’s four lessons we can pick up that are easy to apply in your organisation to lift your performance in getting strategy delivered.
Read more…(Prefer to watch rather than read? Click here, 5 mins with captions.)
“System-thinking”. It’s been around for decades and gets increasingly more popular as complexity ratchets up. But what does it mean?
I recently had 24 hours off life (I have three kids) and took the chance to read “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan, great writer from the New York Times. One piece stood out to me as a great way to explain systems thinking.
Pollan talks about “nutritionism”, the idea that we can work out what’s good in food by breaking it down to its component parts. Take broccoli – we generally consider that to be healthy, and you might know about anti-oxidants, those things that fight baddies inside us.
Here’s what’s interesting – when certain anti-oxidants are isolated, removed from the food and administered, they don’t always have the same healthy effect as when they are consumed as part of eating the vegetable. This means there’s something going on in the way the whole thing works together to create the healthy effect…broccoli is more than just a delivery system for anti-oxidants.
In other words…broccoli is a system!
Read more…Prefer to watch on video rather than read? Click here, 5 mins with Captions.
I often help growing organisations that have been successful, yet are starting to feel like they are overwhelmed as well as grinding to a halt. This often comes with a feeling of failure in the CEO and perhaps the Exec team, with good old imposter syndrome usually raising its head.
The good news is…. the situation is not a failure at all. It’s completely normal.
And to explain this as well as to know what to do, I often lean on the brilliant work of Dr. Ichak Adizes, in particular his Business Lifecycle.
Read more…Prefer to watch on video rather than read? Click here, 5 minutes with captions.
Getting your culture moving in the direction you need doesn’t have to be a mystery. There are tangible actions you can take right now that will make a difference.
I’ve named them the 4 S’s, and if you know the work of Frances Frei and Anne Morriss in Unleashed, and the body of work known as Systems Leadership developed by Ian Macdonald, Catherine Burke and Karl Stewart…you’ll already be familiar with some of these ideas.
First – my definition – culture is the shared understanding about the way you need act to fit in around here. Don’t get too caught up in it…this works fine.
Read more…Prefer to watch on video than read? Click here – 4 mins with captions.
What makes it hard to get stuff done at work? Interruptions.
And even if you’re not constantly looking at email (or some other interruption device you’ve installed like Slack), there’s an awareness of a constantly building-up bunch of stuff coming towards you…so the urge to check is strong.
Some companies are deliberately doing something about this, and one that stands out to me is the software company Basecamp which is run by Jason Friend and David Heinemeier Hansson, who look like this:
Prefer to watch on video than read? Click here – 3 mins with captions.
Traditional hierarchy looks like this – a pyramid (and BTW it’s a very appropriate organising principle for many, many situations, so don’t feel guilty if you’re running one or in one).
The hierarchy shows us which roles have the job of being accountable for other roles…but it also can be used to show us what Elliott Jaques discovered as different levels of work. I’ve drawn them in here…
Read more…Prefer to watch on video than read? Click here – 5 mins with captions.
The Team Leader role. Called lots of things – sometimes ‘Team Leader’, older-school names are ‘Supervisor’ and ‘Leading Hand’, modern names are ‘Coordinator’.
Then we have the Manager role. Sometimes called that, often now called ‘Team Leader’ because management has apparently become evil, and in the US this role can be called ‘Supervisor’.
And before you get started on ‘hierarchy is bad’, remember that most of us work in hierarchies, and it remains the optimal structure in many situations.
If it’s run well. Which is what this is about.
Read more…Why read when you can watch on video? Click here – 5 mins, with captions.
You can increase the throughput of your show hugely with one simple change.
For real life.
But don’t take my word for it, let’s turn to one of the total gurus – Eli Goldratt.
As part of the brilliant Goldratt Satellite Program, which you can still buy and watch the legend himself (I’m not associated with it BTW), he tells the story about the maintenance area of the Israeli Air Force.
Read more…