Category: Uncategorized
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LEADING THROUGH THE INTELLIGENCE AGE SERIES (PART 2) In “Company” published in 1979, Beckett returns to that refrain again and again throughout his piece , as if starting over were not a failure but the only honest way forward. It simply is the recognition that certainty was never coming, and the decision to begin again…
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Why the Old Sources of Meaning Have Run Out — and What Organisations Can Build in Their Place.. Before We Talk About Purpose I have carried a passage from Baudrillard for over a decade. It is the bleakest, most precise description of the world we live and work in that I have ever read. “We…
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The Condition Every Organisation Claims to Want and Almost None Have Built. Before We Talk About Culture I have been working in a lot of rooms. Leadership teams in Paris, boardrooms in Singapore, strategy sessions in Geneva, Cairo, Ahmedabad, Melbourne — from 6 individuals to four hundred people who had never really spoken to each…
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Why the Global Development System Must Learn to Think Together — Starting Now. Before the Argument Starts. I have spent more than a decade working alongside these organizations. WHO. UNDP. GAVI. WFP. World Bank Group. In Geneva, yes — but more importantly, in the field. In West Africa during vaccination campaigns. In the Middle East…
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We are living through a period that defies the logic of the organizations we inherited. The hierarchical model that shaped the twentieth century was built for a world that changed slowly enough to be managed from the top down. It gave us stability, predictability, and scale. But it was also built on an assumption that…
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W. Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety is one of the foundational principles of cybernetics — the science of how complex systems regulate themselves and maintain autonomy in the face of disruption. Its formulation is deceptively simple: “Only variety can absorb variety.” A system overwhelmed by complexity cannot regulate itself with a narrow range of…
the collaboration principle 