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Archive for the ‘Leadership’ Category

Over the past two years in ALNAP, we have been leading work on humanitarian innovations which resulted in a major study, an international conference and a significant investment in innovation processes by a major donor. It is clear to us that the term innovation is being used more and more across the aid sector, whether by senior leaders like Rajiv [...]

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IBM recently released the 2010 Global CEO Survey, its 4th such study since 2004, based on over 1,500 face-to-face interviews with private sector CEOs and senior public sector leaders from 33 different industries spread over sixty countries. A concise summary, drawing on work by Irving Wladawsky-Berger, is below. In the  past three studies, CEOs consistently said that coping with change was [...]

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In the middle of the 19th century, one of the most widely publicised scientific struggles was to predict the motion of planetary bodies. Using Newtonian mechanics, it was simple enough to calculate the trajectory of one or two planets. However, when a third was added into the mix, the equations become complex and incomprehensible. Steven Strogatz described [...]

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In the 1970s, systems thinker Russell Ackoff argued that some of the greatest problems happen when messy problems are dealt with as if they were simple puzzles. The true extent of interconnectedness and interdependence of the world we live in is ignored or downplayed until a crisis – i.e. when it is already too late. Time [...]

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John Lennon famously quipped that life was what happened when you were busy making other plans. A new book Dynamic Sustainabilities: Technology, Environment, Social Justice from the fantastic STEPS centre at the University of Sussex focuses on how much the same contradiction plays out in the global movements toward development, environmental sustainability and social justice. [...]

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Owen Barder recently used a few examples of the work of complexity thinkers, notably Clay Shirker and Joseph Tainter, to suggest that the aid system may be due to collapse imminently, because its own internal complexity would reduce its resilience to the changes that are happening around it. It’s a powerful argument, and one which is worth building [...]

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(2nd of 2 posts exploring  self-organisation and emergence in transport / traffic and the relevance for aid strategies – first was last week’s piece on slime moulds) Traffic planners are increasingly moving away from signs and regulations to increase traffic safety and address congestion. Rather than legislating for driver behaviour, they are requiring drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists [...]

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“Copying nature’s ideas allows people to harness the power of evolution to come up with clever products. Now a group of researchers has taken this idea a step further by using an entire living organism—a slime mould—to solve a complex problem. In this case, the challenge was to design an efficient rail network for the [...]

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Bill Tate is a leadership specialist who focuses on the use of systems approaches to understand and improve leadership development. On his new Systemic Leadership blog, he has written about the challenge of writing and fulfilling job descriptions in a complex environments. His ideas have some resonance with a  popular November 2009 post on the Peter Principle and [...]

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The Obama presidential campaign owed its victory not to a single charismatic candidate, but to the efforts of a disciplined and motivated organisation whose influences go back to landmark civil rights movements. Many of the principles were consistent with the emerging ideas of ‘complex adaptive leadership’. A recent MIT lecture featured Marshall Ganz, veteran of the [...]

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