Just before the shutdown began, I was talking with one of my neighbours, a wonderful woman in her 80s who remembers the Nazi occupation of her native Holland. She remarked that the restrictions reminded her of that awful episode in that time was taking on the same odd quality: there was today when you focused…
As some of you know my creative practice is an important part of my life. I am not able to get to my studio at the moment and while I have often made work at home too, I have found it harder to focus at the moment. Last week, I was reminded of an exercise…
A lot of us, almost without warning, have experienced significant non-routine work as well as life changes. As a result, it is hard not to fill our thoughts with things that might have been – the cancelled exhibition, the postponed event, the tour that might never happen now. Not to mention the changes to personal…
Just in case your sense of time isn’t confused enough we’re sharing our Friday selection box on a Thursday. Sorry for any confusion that may cause! Susan and I are going to take a bit of a breather over Easter, time to reflect and recharge. We hope you will have the opportunity to do the…
Susan was a trustee of Clean Break, a women only theatre company that works with women who have experienced the criminal justice system. With Dawn’s help, Susan worked with the then Chief Executive to create a mess map. Mapping out the issues and the stakeholders helped us to understand why we could not solve our…
Last time we talked about messy problems, those problems with high levels of task complexity, today we are talking about wicked problems. Wickedness isn’t a degree of difficulty. Wicked issues are different because traditional processes can’t resolve them …. A wicked problem has innumerable causes, is tough to describe, and doesn’t have a right answer……
Last week, we started this mini-series with some thoughts about tame problems – the ones you know how to solve. Today we are looking at the rather more challenging area of messy problems. Messes are puzzles, rather than solving them, we resolve their complexities…We are increasingly faced with problems of organized complexity, clusters of interrelated…
Well, that was quite a week, and I confess I am pretty tired today. I feel a bit guilty saying that because I am not a key worker, I am not on the front line, I am just adjusting to my own little bubble and trying to make some sense of all that is happening.…
We thought you might be interested in a few things that have attracted our attention recently. Our global experiment in home working This article in the FT – How is the home working experiment going? – caught my eye. There are lots of great ideas to try out and I liked the emphasis on experimentation…
Yesterday I introduced the idea of different types of problems and offered a way of thinking about problems in terms of their complexity. Today’s post is about the first of the problem types: tame problems. I have also included some thoughts on how to solve problems creatively and well. Tame problems: Known problems with known…
Problem solving is a major part of what Dawn and I do in our consulting lives. To solve a problem, you need to understand not just the context (who, what, when, where, why and how) but also what kind of problem you are dealing with because solving different types of problems requires different approaches. One…
Trust is ‘one party’s willingness to be vulnerable to another party based on the belief that the latter party is competent, open, concerned and reliable.’ (Mishra, 1996: 265) Many of us have probably never experienced a situation where we have felt quite as vulnerable as we do right now. All aspects of our lives are…
Over the last couple of weeks many of you will have been involved in board discussions about decisions you would rather not take. In such circumstances, charities with boards of unpaid, part-time trustees face particular challenges. Trustees cannot know the organisation as well as the executive team and as such they will be dealing with…