Reinventing the organisation for speed in the post-COVID 19 era One of the themes emerging from people’s responses to the COVID-19 crisis has been the speed at which individuals, governments and organisations have suddenly found themselves able to move and change. This article from consultants McKinseys outlines nine ways in which positive elements of our…
On Monday Dawn wrote about the central importance of behaviour in determining how, and how well, we can weather the current storms. Perhaps particularly in challenging times, when people’s ability to tolerate disconnects and dissonance is lower than usual, we are judged by what we do rather than what we say. To help with the…
Strategizing and planning are important but it’s how we are behaving at the moment that really counts. That’s what builds trust. I sometimes look at what the big consulting houses (Mckinseys, PwC etc) are up to and while it doesn’t always translate, the scale of resourcing for both them and the entities they work with…
Fabric of protest Fabulous monthly programme from the People’s History Museum in Manchester that combines creativity and social justice, encouraging people to create textile works in response to items in the collection. Building community connections online A great programme from the Jewish Museum London that encourages people to connect online through sharing creative work in…
Here’s some food for thought. The term hierarchy was first used in the late 1880s to describe a system of organisation in the Church where priests were divided into ranks. It was also adopted up by the military and the state. The approach spread during the Industrial revolution as a result of a growing focus…
This week our main focus is going to be on organising. This is in part prompted by our forthcoming session on Thursday which is intended to open up the conversation about how the sector can organise itself better going forward and Build Back Better. I am deliberately using the term organising here, rather than organisations…
Some stories about change – about how it is made by people who care enough to challenge ‘the ways things are done’. The invention of rape kits The powerful story of how one woman changed the attitude of the criminal justice system to sexual assault, and how a man got the credit. We need to…
On Monday we wrote about why thinking about business cases rather than business plans could be a helpful shift in mindset. Today we want to share a tool that we are developing to support you in designing outline business cases creatively and quickly. The Business Case Canvas Susan The Business Case Canvas (BCC) is…
It is likely that most of the sector is looking at a period of substantial transition over the coming months. Given the extent of the crisis created by Covid-19 it is also unlikely that the required response will be a case of simply tweaking the current business plan. In most instances it will require a substantial…
How Google Docs became the social media of the resistance This piece from MIT’s Technology Review documents how people are using Google Docs to organise online in preference or in addition to social media People want a persistent artifact, [Clay] Shirky says. “If you are in an action-oriented network, you need an artifact to coordinate…
The Art of Organising: designing our organisations and organising for the new abnormal 25th June, 10 – 11.30am How do we step up to the challenges and the opportunities provided by this period of uncertainty and rethink the way we organise as a sector? What might our organisations look like in future? What are the…
‘We started by trying to amend our existing structure, but it wasn’t working. We know that we need to start with a blank sheet of paper but where do we start?’ This insight, and variations upon it have been a recurring feature of the conversations we have been having over the past few weeks. A…
I must admit I was slightly taken aback with the response to my post last week about organising creatively, it certainly seems like there is an appetite to rethink the way we are organised. To pinch a phrase from TED there is an energy to ‘build back better.’ I have been increasingly involved in organisational…