Every change initiative, in every organization, regardless of scope, has something in common. A desire to improve something. It doesn’t matter if we’re installing a new inventory control system; implementing a new quality control process; or relocating an office. At the core, these are fundamentally the same tasks – we’re all trying to make something…
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This month our webinar will be a little different. But we don’t launch books every month, as a rule, so it seemed like a good idea. Mark Mullaly’s latest book, Exercising Agency, has just been published by Gower. This book takes on the challenge of translating his doctoral thesis into human-readable form. It also provides…
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When it was published in November 2014, Value Proposition Design became an instant bestseller. Value Proposition Design is focussed on ensuring that innovators build value into the products and services they design. The framework has been developed to provide innovators, entrepreneurs and designers with a structure and framework to design solutions that directly meet customer…
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One of the most prominent management buzz phrases is “Organizational Culture”, and given the difficulty most organizations encounter as they attempt to change their existing culture, or even as they try to define it, the word “Culture” would appear to have almost magically incomprehensible properties. Defined simplistically, “Organizational Culture” is a collection of specific behaviours…
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All of us have to present. Many of us, given the choice, would really rather not. Fear of speaking is one of the biggest phobias in North America; in fact, research participants have indicated they prefer to receive electric shocks than present in public. The inherent challenge, of course, is that if we fear something,…
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In the first webinar in this series, we introduced the concept of VUCA. A term coined by the Army War College, VUCA is an acronym for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. These dimensions describe a lot of situations we describe ourselves in today. And while it might be an open question as to whether the…
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How should we implement change? What methodology should we use? It’s a simple enough question, surely there’s a simple answer — especially since we get to do it so often. Every time we implement a new system or install a new process, we’re implementing change. Surely there are some things that work, and some things…
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Every organization delivers services to its customers, whether in the private sector, the public sector, or somewhere in between. But what’s a service? Who is a customer? How do you define them, how do you evaluate them, and how do you know they are being delivered effectively? Adopting a formal and disciplined approach to defining…
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The world feels a little bit crazy right now. In fact, it has for a while. Our organizations feel like semi-organized chaos on good days, and on bad days-well-it’s just chaotic. Things seem no better in the economy, in politics or in every day life on the streets. We are unnerved by uncertainty, challenged by…
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‘Technical debt’ is a brilliantly concise metaphor coined by Ward Cunningham back in the 1990’s that cannily describes the behaviour of software and surrounding processes implemented in the real world of limited costs and time. The debt refers to work undone, which either must eventually be undertaken by subsequent projects or managed through ever more…
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