Category: Articles

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Organizational Addictions: Breaking the Habit

Caffeine Addiction It’s 6:00 a.m. on a Monday morning. The alarm clock blares, jolting you out of bed. You shuffle down to…

Redesigning Our Schools, Reinventing the Future

“Our only real hope to survive and thrive in the increasingly tough world of global business is to have the world’ s best managers and…

Using “Shifting the Burden” to Break Organizational Gridlock

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote American poet Robert Frost in his poem “Mending Wall.” As the speaker and his neighbor…

The “Attractiveness Principle”: Trying to Be All Things to All People

Your friends raved about the new restaurant in town — “Great food, great service, great price” — so you finally decided to go. By…

Systems Thinking and Strategic Planning in Healthcare

Throughout my 17 years as an executive in various hospitals and healthcare systems, systems thinking has become an increasingly important element in my work.

Why Simulate? Using Models for Strategic Planning

Your customers are demanding more services for the same price. How can you meet their expectations with your existing staff? As your company begins…

Transforming a Command-and-Control Culture

Introducing learning organization principles to a company is difficult and fraught with uncertainty. How do you lead without taking the reins? How do you…

TQM and Systems Thinking as Theory-Building Tools

Our brains are pattern-making systems — they organize our perceptions of the world into patterns that enable us to function effectively. For example, when…

Organizational Learning and Leadership Development at EDS

Evaluating a program on “learning how to learn” is difficult using traditional quantitative criteria. Fritjof Capra, author of The Turning Point, offers these guidelines…

Lessons in Systems Thinking: A Tale from the Land of Middle Health

Microtown, a small community deep within the Land of Middle Health, isn’t much different from other towns. Its citizens are young and old, rich…