Category: Articles

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Check In, Check Out: A Tool for “Real” Conversations

Your daughter was sick last night and you didn’t get much sleep. Tony’s car was rear-ended on the way to the office. Vivian has…

Using Causal Loop Diagrams to Make Mental Models Explicit

Making mental models explicit can enhance both individual and organizational learning by making individual learning more accessible and therefore more easily transferable to the…

All Methods Are Wrong. Some Methods Are Useful.

Interest in systems concepts is reviving and broadening. However, the sheer size of the field poses a dilemma for both newcomers and those who…

Spiritual Intelligence: A New Paradigm for Collaborative Action

What makes a great collaboration? One view is that a collaboration is only as great as the individuals who collaborate within it. Another is…

Thinking Systemically About Strategy

During the mid-1980s, a large high-technology company launched a project to begin thinking more systemically about strategy. “COPEX” (a fictional name) designed, manufactured, sold,…

The Evolution of a Shared Vision

Margaret Wheatley describes vision not just as a destination but as a field that permeates the organization, affecting all employees who bump against it.

Balancing Loops with Delays

A simple balancing loop can be thought of as a basic control loop. In this type of feedback loop, any discrepancies between desired…

Superstitious Learning

The drive toward improvement has become a way of life in corporations today. Total Quality Management, Business Process Reengineering, and other improvement techniques have…

Future Thinking by Middle Managers: A Neglected Necessity

This is a story about what happened to a group of technical managers working in a multinational corporation, the Big Can Corporation (BCC)*, when…

Human Dynamics for the 21st Century

As a global society increasingly becomes a reality and people strive to come together across divisions of culture, religion, race, age, gender, and other…