Is an organisation a kind of ‘organism’ surviving in a changing environment? That metaphor has gained a great deal of currency over the years. However, organisational development innovator Dr Gervase Bush thinks it’s outlived its usefulness. It invites a “diagnostic”...
Business academic David Needle describes organisational culture as the collective beliefs, values and principles of its members, a dynamic and evolving habitat that arises out of the continually bubbling brew of history, product, market, management style, type of...
Let’s look at the third step of Professors Beshears’ and Gino’s change management model: understanding the underlying causes of the defined problem. Two questions are critical here: is the problem mainly due to people failing to act (i.e. insufficient motivation), or...
In a seminal paper of 1978, the social psychologist Kenneth J. Gergen argued that normal scientific assumptions couldn’t be applied to the study of human relationships; they simply couldn’t achieve the prediction and control they’d accomplished in the so-called “hard”...
There’s a curious fact about decision-making: most of us often make the wrong ones. If you’re trying to decide what to order at a restaurant, the consequences probably won’t be that severe. However, if you’re in a leadership role and you’re trying to enhance employee...
In complex open systems such as organisations, the classical logic of linear causality (in which a cause leads to a proportional effect) just doesn’t work. Organisational development and change are shaped by little interactions that have unexpectedly big effects. Tiny...