Category: Articles
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Large-Scale Projects as Complex Systems: Managing “Scope Creep”
C.Northcote Parkinson’s now famous adage, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” may be overly optimistic. Unfortunately, work tends…
Relinking Life and Work: Toward a Better Future
The modern workplace is far less than ideal for workers who want integrated lives. As one engineer put it, “The problem isn’t for those…
The Journey to Z: Realizing the Potential of an Organization
Read the business media today and you’ll see that organizations of all types, from all sectors, are in deep trouble. There are many reasons…
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…