I have a proposal for how you can communicate more effectively, starting today. It involves a subtle but important shift in how you think about communication itself: Instead of thinking of communication as the sending and receiving of messages, think of it as a collaborative act, where you and those you’re communicating with have a…
NSFW: “Maybe a 70% failure rate for org change initiatives isn’t so bad?”
“70% of change initiatives fail.” This old chestnut has been with us for more than 20 years. The debate goes on but it’s gotten a little bit stale. Still there’s value in reinvigorating the discussion, starting with an NSFW question like this, for example: Why do we assume that a 30% success rate (a 70%…
Notes on “Generativity”
June, 2021 Recently I was invited to be co-author on a paper on ‘generativity.’ Briefly, generativity refers to creating and caring for future generations. Here are a few notes from that effort. Origins and meaning. The construct of generativity originates with psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, in the 1950s. According to Erikson, during life, a…
Problem Framing
Your success at solving problems, depends on how well you frame them in the first place. Framing is the creative activity of experimenting with, and deciding on, what you choose to treat as problematic.
The Hall of Frame, Inductee #1
Problem Framing For a pragmatic approach to managing and leading, problem framing is of central importance. Elsewhere, I’ve written in detail about problem framing and re-framing, or see the brief overview in the box to the right. But for this post, the first in a series, the purpose is different. If you routinely employ problem…
Emotional Intelligence
Here is a brief overview of Emotional Intelligence, or at least my understanding of it, created for a client presentation in November, 2020
Re-Thinking the Goals of Public Education
What if our top students were judged to be so, not because of what they ‘knew,’ but because of what they had shown they could ‘do’?