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 [...]
Archive for the ‘Leadership’ Category
Complexity and Innovation: A Plexus Institute interview
Posted in Innovation, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Strategy on June 15, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Global CEO survey reveals primary challenge as addressing the ‘complexity gap’
Posted in Financial crisis, Institutions, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Reports and Studies on June 8, 2010 | 3 Comments »
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 [...]
Gazing at the fingerprints of chaos in the UK elections
Posted in Campaigns, Chaos, Institutions, Leadership, Public Policy on May 10, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Lessons rising from the ash
Posted in Financial crisis, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Natural disasters, Public Policy, Reports and Studies on May 3, 2010 | 1 Comment »
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 [...]
What happens when you are busy making other plans
Posted in Climate change, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Resilience, Strategy on April 30, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
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. [...]
The collapsing aid system: slow, uneven, with winners and losers
Posted in Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Organisations on April 20, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
From traffic management to development management?
Posted in Leadership, Organisations, Public Policy, Self organisation, Strategy, Traffic, Urbanisation on February 22, 2010 | 3 Comments »
(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 [...]
Slime mould, simple rules and the politics of self-organisation
Posted in Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Self organisation on February 15, 2010 | 3 Comments »
“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 [...]
Is Your Job An Open System?
Posted in Institutions, Leadership, Organisations on January 14, 2010 | 2 Comments »
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 [...]
Lessons in Distributed Leadership from the Obama Campaign
Posted in Campaigns, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Strategy on December 4, 2009 | 2 Comments »
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 [...]
