Category: Notes
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Three faces of power
I am convinced that we need to change existing power structures in order to achieve organizational democracy. An example are the struggles we see with scaling agile software development to the whole organization. This is ultimately a question of changing the power distribution. Kenneth E. Boulding defines the three faces of power as: Threat Power…
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Tankeutbyte
Jag är ny i bloggandets värld sedan i höstas. Mitt syfte med bloggen kan du läsa här. Det jag har märkt är att mina tankar blir tydligare om jag formulerar dom i skrift. Dessutom är det spännande att utbyta tankar. Då föds nya tankar!
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Great results happen when
Great results happen when: People know why they are doing their work. Organizations focus on outcomes and impacts rather than features. Teams decide what to do next based on immediate and direct feedback from the use of their work. Everyone cares. Notes: This is from a workshop in London in February 2013 with “thought leaders”…
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Self-organization is not anarchy or dictatorship
Self-organization is not social chaos (as under anarchy) or social order (as under dictatorship). Put in another way, dictatorship or anarchy makes self-organization difficult.
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What’s behind the need of control?
What’s the driver behind the need of control in autocratic command-and-control management? Here’s what I found in Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination by Walter Wink. “Why do you need to control everything?” he was asked. “Because if things go wrong I’ll get blamed.” “What fear lies behind that need…
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A matter of life and death
John Wenger asks in his post A Matter of Life and Death “Why would the whole of the Universe be a complex, self-organising and interdependent system, and a business be a top-down, controlled machine?” Yes indeed why? He continues saying that “Even if we continue to “KNOW” that our business is a machine, it does…
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Management as stewardship of the living
There was a Stoos Connect gathering in Amsterdam this week with some twenty speakers including Steve Denning, Dan Pink, and others. Videos of the talks will be made available on-line shortly. Going forward, Steve Denning suggests the following Five Guideposts For The Future Of Leadership and Management: We need to recognize the extent of the…
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The living organization
I have raised the view in a previous blog post that an organization is more like an organism than a machine. Now, I’m reading The Living Company: Growth Learning and Longevity in Business by Arie de Geus. The question at the heart of the book is: What if we think about a company as a…
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Safe space
Daniel Mezick emphasizes the importance of psychological safe space in his book The Culture Game: Tools for the Agile Manager. I find this very interesting and think that Daniel is right when he writes on that: “This psychological safety is one of (if not THE) most important aspects of developing a Learning Organization.” (p. 55)…
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Henri Bortoft
I have recently read two of Henri Bortoft’s books, The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science and Taking Appearance Seriously: The Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought. I am particularly fascinated by the dynamic way of seeing which is explained at length by Henri Bortoft. It’s important to take the ‘appearance’…