Karl Duncker’s experiment demonstrating Functional Fixedness, which I described last time, has a good deal of relevance for any company trying to develop a breakthrough product. Most of the time, a talented group of people fail to make headway not because of a lack of...
Tag: work
Building trust in organisations
Engagement strategies remain important for improving profitability; but engagement without building trust is an empty shell. High profile public scandals over the last few years – phone hacking by journalists, reckless actions by banks and misbehaviour by individual...
Curing functional fixedness (Part One)
Curing functional fixedness (or, how to turn a desk into a magic castle). Small children are extraordinary inventive in using everyday objects to augment their imaginative play. A large box becomes a space capsule; a table, a blanket and a couple of chairs become an...
Why difference ranks with diversity in organisations
Diversity in organisations needs to include intra-personal difference and a tolerance for constructive conflict. If an organisation’s future depends on its leadership pipeline and its staff’s talents, the right lenses for spotting potential really have to be in...
Leadership and the art of not knowing (Part Two)
Here’s the core predicament that those in leadership find themselves in: virtually all organisations prize competence and expertise; however, in a mind-bogglingly complex world, no one individual can possibly have all the answers. A study by business consulting and...
Management, uncertainty and complexity (Part One)
In the 1990s, when academics and business leaders first began discussing the idea of applying complexity science to organisations and businesses, their enthusiasm failed to be picked up by the majority of managers. Managers were resistant to seeing the world as it...