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…
Power Invisible
A Massachusetts teacher I once knew asked his tenth graders to blurt out the first words that came to mind on hearing the word…
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…
Adaptive Action: Leveraging Uncertainty in Your Organization
It is the bottom of the ninth. The game clock ticks to zero. The goalie has a weak knee; the star forward has five…
The Learner’s Path
In my previous article, Confessions of a Recovering Knower(The Systems Thinker Vol. 16, No. 7), I described my journey from being a knower to…
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…