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Archives of #transformation

A Heard of Elephants: Managing Gnarly Stakeholder Issues

do a lot of stakeholder management, either building teams, helping to change how organisations work, or getting conflicting groups to collaborate. And it’s staggering how often the agenda and subsequent outcome of the initiative is driven, not by the leaders, but by the elephants in the room. The inconvenient, invisible and usually surly metaphorical pachyderms that people know are there, but aren’t willing to deal with. But you have to. In fact, if you want to do this well, start with the elephants.
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Want Real Innovation? Fire The Prom Queen Committee!

Why is consensus around new ideas seen as a desirable thing? Because it isn’t.  It’s like kryptonite. New things are by definition disruptive. They have to challenge the status quo: to be heretical. So surely what we should be looking for is healthy controversy rather than consensus? After all, we don’t all agree on whether…
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Eyes Wide Shut: perception and change

You cannot consciously change what you do not consciously notice. Of course, we unconsciously change things all the time. We fail to notice the bin as we back the car out and change the shape of our bumper bar and the mood of the day. The boss is consistently late or didactic and pretty soon…
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Spellbound: when jargon replaces action

Have you ever turned someone into a frog? Of all the magic words in all the stories through history and time, Abracadabra, or later, Abrahadabra, is probably the most recognisable. It was the Word Of Double Power that represented the union of the microcosm with the macrocosm and roughly translated into the rather wonderful phrase…
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Botoxing Brands: the magnetic power of genuineness over perfection

Just when you think you’ve seen everything, you go to a school reunion. At the last one I attended, we all gleefully got to play ‘who on earth is that?’ An awesome testament to the powers of surgical transformation and personal chutzpa, our mystery classmate commanded the spotlight as she did the mwa-mwa tour of…
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Perception Is The Root Of All Error

ANY CHARACTER HERE Well, maybe not all. But about 90% of all mistakes we make apparently come down to errors in perception (how we map the information we take in) rather than faulty thinking. That’s a phenomenal statistic, because it implies that by just changing how we see things we can have a profound effect…
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Garbage Farming

Kibera is Africa’s largest slum  (with over 1 million inhabitants) and one of the most spectacular testaments to the transforming power of human ingenuity I’ve ever seen.With huge limitations on land, energy, water and food, people’s survival depends on how ingenious and innovative they can be. My favourite story is of how a local farming…
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