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Change, Trauma and Business

Last week I started taking a three-year professional development programme in Somatic Experiencing, a trauma treatment process based on the work of Peter Levine. Though I am not a therapist, my coaching work in change processes brings me into situations regularly in which trauma plays a role, and I had become aware of the need to inform myself better about what I was looking at and how I could support dealing with it productively. According to Levine, many of the problems people face in their daily lives are expressions...

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February, 23 2012 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
"It will all be okay in the end…"

I found this hanging outside the office of a client…

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November, 26 2011 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
The Value of Culture

Part of the big shift which is taking place in business and society derives from a fundamental breakdown in what one could call a piecemeal or single issue approach to life. One of the most common responses of politicians, businesses, but also everyday people to the increasing complexity of life is to focus on the one facet of their reality which they think they understand, and then to push for changes for the better. Single issue strategies are vulnerable to compensating feedback, however, and are never productive...

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October, 29 2011 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
Getting Practical

When thinking flows, I find that I often don't know what I'm going to say or write until I listen to what I am saying or read my own texts. Writing this blog often serves that purpose, helping me in bits and bites to get ideas about what I want to do. As ideas have emerged, a bigger picture has started to form, so that I felt inspired together with a colleague of mine to create the frame for a new company. Recently, then, the Lemniscate Institute went online, as a virtual space for knowledge workers and cultural...

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October, 27 2011 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
On the Emptiness of Thinking and the Richness of Experience

Reposted from the Cognitive Edge Guest Blog I am writing this week: I'd like to comment on Keith's comment about my notion in my first guest post that ideas in themselves are empty. I agree that many ideas lack substance not because they are empty in themselves, but because they have not been fully thought through. Even when they have, however, they remain just ideas. There was a nice report on research into the evolutionary function of reasoning a few months ago, which posited that thinking had developed...

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August, 17 2011 • 1 Comment • 0 Faves
On the Blind Spot for Complexity

Written in response to a comment on my guest-blog contributions at Cognitive Edge: I too have been getting questioning looks when I present enthusiastically some insights from complexity theory to clients. To me, at least, it all makes perfect sense, and it takes a serious act of self-distancing to understand the perspectives from which it does not, or is misunderstood. Yesterday I saw a charming ad video by Nilofer Merchant for her last book, The New How, in which she talks about the "air sandwich" which exists...

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August, 16 2011 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
German Culture and Complexity

In a new Vanity Fair article on the role of the Germans in the international financial crisis, Michael Lewis, the author of the trenchant Big Short, reports on an interview road trip he takes to try to understand the character of the people who were on the other side of the Wall Street bets that sent the world economy into crisis. His portrait describes the bankers at state owned banks, who bought huge quantities of junk financial products from Wall Street, as loyal, bureaucratic, and unbelievably trusting and naive...

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August, 12 2011 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
A Short Meditation on Politics and Creative Destruction

Watching the blockade in the US Congress over raising the budget deficit gave me pause to reflect on the nature of the progress of humanity. The dishonesty of the debates and their careless use of US solvency to give power to ideological positions made me wonder--briefly--whether it makes sense to believe in human progress at all. As a child of the 70's, I hoped that the US had left such fundamentalism behind it for good--or at least been able to relegate it to the darker corners of its civilization. Yet the...

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August, 5 2011 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
Report on SenseMaking Accreditation at Cognitive Edge

Amsterdam was beautiful last week, a fitting backdrop to the accreditation course provided by Cognitive Edge that I attended. Given my last post on the methodology, let me say that my take away was that consulting in the world of complex challenges and strategies is not dead, only different. Dave Snowden's love of both hard science and philosophy was evident in the programme, as the Cognitive Edge colleagues took us through basic principles of complexity theory, narrative and sensemaking, demonstrating the content...

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June, 7 2011 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves

Next Page 1 of 4

Change, Trauma and Business

"It will all be okay in the end…"

The Value of Culture

Getting Practical

On the Emptiness of Thinking and the Richness of Experience

On the Blind Spot for Complexity

German Culture and Complexity

A Short Meditation on Politics and Creative Destruction

Report on SenseMaking Accreditation at Cognitive Edge

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