Three reasons why change management fails

If we are going to adapt our businesses in a rapid and controlled way, then we need large-scale organisational change. Based on some of the latest thinking on organisational change, this article identifies three key reasons why change management fails. The reasons are: Change consultants are insufficiently equipped on a personal level. Most change models are incomplete. Capacity is widely overlooked, on …

UN’s IPCC: “climate change consequences ‘bleak’, but cheap to fix”

Back in March the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its latest Working Group II report. The report predicted: food insecurity due to more intense droughts, floods, and heat waves a decline in crop yields starting in 2030, even as global food demand continues to rise water insecurity, due to shrinking of glaciers and changing …

Greyston brownies

Greyston is a bakery with a different view on the world. They don’t hire people to bake brownies, they bake brownies so that they can hire people. Founded in 1982, Greyston is the USA’s “leading social enterprise“, and explicitly aims to support underprivileged people in New York state by providing them with the employment, skills and resources needed to lift …

No change on Climate Change

The IPCC has released its latest report on climate change. In summary: Climate change has already impacted natural and human systems on every continent. Climate change is also damaging global food production, cutting our supply of fresh drinking water, and damaging our infrastructure. Coastal flooding could reduce global economic production by 10 percent by the end of the century. And the widespread damage already …

Holacracy: changing the future of management

Yesterday we posted about the four-day-week startup: an organisation that is growing fast, yet there are no managers and all employees work only a four day week. (Technology manages the workflow, anybody can propose a new project.) Feedback from some readers has pointed us towards holacracy, “a real-world-tested social technology for purposeful organization”, which “radically …

IPCC and renewable energy — the view from Texas

So, the IPCC has concluded that averting climate change catastrophe is ’eminently affordable’. Of course it is — it always was. Quibbles about the ‘cost’ of averting climate change have always been spurious, partly because the cost of not taking action will always be greater (ie death), and partly because any ‘cost’ will always show …

Welcome to the four day week startup

When the going gets tough it can often seem that the future must be worse than the past. But here is a story about one new company that is already turning over several million dollars a year, growing at 120% a year, and achieving all this by working a four day week. Yes, a four …

Bad news, good news…

Two stories here, one describing the problem, one addressing part of the solution. First, a new study by Nasa shows yet again that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades, just as many previous empires and civilisations have done. Echoing Jared Diamond (TED talk here, synopsis here) they find the key factors driving the risk of …

Leadership as “guided serendipity”

To thrive in a changing world we will have to find new ways of leading. Adam Cutler, design studio director of global giants IBM, calls one such way “guided serendipity.” It is working for him. Guided serendipity involves letting go of trying to control everything, and focusing instead on the key elements that create the conditions for success. …