We have somehow endured the fourth week of sheltering at home for the corona virus, and we are beginning to understand the nature of this crisis. It is also the 10 year anniversary of publication of “Mastering the Unpredictable.” The corona virus response is unfolding exactly like an unpredictable crisis — both the good and the bad. Continue reading
In the 4 and 1/2 years since “Mastering the Unpredictable” introduced the idea of Adaptive Case Management to the world, a growing group of people have struggled to define what it really means to make use of this new emerging trend. This new book “When Thinking Matters in the Workplace” takes it one step further — to outline what a manager needs to know, to lead a team of innovative knowledge workers, and how to put in place a system to best support them. Continue reading
Niels Pflaeging’s amazing little book, Organize for Complexity, gives good advice on how to create self managing organization that are resilient and stable. Continue reading
At TEDxZurich 2013 Nicolas Perony gave an excellent talk about complexity that has relevance in the collaboration technology field. He has some excellent examples of how complex systems differ from complicated, machine oriented system, as well as the risks of thinking of complex systems as if they were machines. Continue reading
What is a Business Architecture and why is it important? My challenge was to define this in terms that can be understood by a non technical business executive. Continue reading
Julian Birkinshaw professor at the London Business School had an interesting article in Forbes a couple weeks ago titled “Managing Complexity: The Battle Between Emergence And Entropy” which comes close to, but falls just short of, making a good recommendation for dealing with complex organizations. Continue reading
This session from the Global Peter Drucker Forum has a lot of gems about management in highly complex situation. Many good hints on leadership for knowledge workers. Continue reading
Managing Complexity was the topic for this year’s Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna a few weeks ago. Complexity overwhelms the old style of command and control management, but the followers of Drucker offer better alternatives. I wish could have attended, but I will have to be satisfied summarizing based on the writings of others. Continue reading
Harold Jarche has a controversial slide cast this week titled “Subversive thoughts” which explores the relationship between the trends for supporting knowledge work, and the role of management as it is traditionally defined. Continue reading
I have written many times about how culturally we have a tendency to want to simplify problems, and solve the separate parts, and this is reductionism. Scientific management is based on this idea, and it is one of the ideas that leads to problematic BPM implementations when your the process is truly complex. In this post I consider where reductionism cam from. Continue reading
Thinking Matters 