Category: Articles
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Rebuilding Trust Within Organizations
Edith was conducting an outplacement seminar designed to offer support to people who had just lost their jobs. Shortly before the session was to…
A Brief Walk into the Future: Speculations About Post-Industrial Organizations
As we look around the world at the fascinating variety of experiments aimed, in one way or another, at accelerating and deepening how organizations…
The Dark Side of Success: Dealing with the Organizational and Emotional Complexities of Growth
Why is it that new organizations start up with great enthusiasm, achieve success in the marketplace, and, just when everything seems to be going…
New Stories Can Generate New Realities
There is no easy or straightforward or guaranteed way to transform complex social systems. My own experience of 20 years of working with transformative…
The World Café Goes Local: A Town Plans for the Future
On the evening of February 27, 2008, the town of Reading, Massachusetts (population 23,708) held its first World Café conversation. The event, open to…
Action-to-Outcome Maps in Impact Assessment
During the last few years, our team at the Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development (OISD) has been working on an important but little examined…
Systems Thinking as a Team-Building Approach
The chief information officer (CIO) of the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, a research hospital with a large outpatient facility, faced a formidable…
Finding Balance: What Aikido Can Teach Us About Conflict
Conflict stories are our most interesting stories. When you see two people deeply engaged in conversation, chances are that one of them is telling…
The Managerial Moment of Truth
Truth is a tricky subject in any context. People rightly ask, what is the truth? How do we know? Are we really talking about…
Schools That Learn: Context and Engagement
In 1988, the first systems thinking classes were started at Orange Grove Middle School in Tucson, Arizona, instigated by Frank Draper, a science teacher,…