A Place of Wondrous Certainty

This week my colleague shared with the rest of our small team part of a transcript from a radio program she had heard over the weekend.  The program talked about grade school Christmas concerts which at this time of year are in full force.  Part of this transcript hit a chord: Childhood is another country. [...]

The Normalcy of Uniqueness

If you listen to pretty much any discussion on organizational challenges or read virtually any book on organizational change, leadership, management or whatever, somewhere it is bound to mention the ‘unprecedented’ pace of change, or the presence of challenges ‘never before encountered’ or some other term to describe how our specific time is unique in [...]

Preference Assessments – What Are They Measuring?

There often is quite heated debate about what preference assessments are actually measuring.  It tends to be a variation of the nature vs. nurture argument with passionate positions being taken on either side.  For us we don’t take so much a nature vs. nurture perspective as trying to balance a psychological and social constructionist perspective.  [...]

Conversations in a Climate of Fear

What are the types of conversations that are the most valuable in organizations when a thread of fear seems to be wrapping itself around us and makes us feel like we don’t want to talk to anyone? It feels like many of us are in this position right now, a climate of fear permeates so [...]

Bark, Skin and Cedar – The Land as Teacher

In just a few days now I will head off with my son to the midOntariowilderness.  We will spend a week paddling, portaging, sweating, swimming, being amazed and being bitten by bugs. But right now I’m writing this blog post and beside me is the book, Bark, Skin and Cedar – Exploring the Canoe in [...]

Organizational Lessons – Midnight in Paris and the Tree of Life

Sometimes you don’t need to pay a brilliant OD person a bunch of money to get some really good insights into organizational life.  Once in a while you can just go to the movies.  For me, watching Midnight in Paris and The Tree of Life in the last month were great lessons in organizational development. [...]

The Complexity of Good Interactions

I had the opportunity and pleasure of spending last evening with a group of HR professionals in our city of London, Ontario.  I had been asked to come and talk a little about our approach to understanding organizations and what we call our infinity interaction process. Other things were happening at this get together.  There [...]

Endings and Beginnings – Being Present to Both

Back in August of 2010 I wrote the post Kids, Parents, Organizations, Models and Understanding  It had to do with a conversation with my son, using our model of organizations, as he left for his last year as a hockey player in an elite amateur league here in Canada. While the message was mostly about ways [...]

Adding Value by Getting Out of the Way

As OD professionals we typically are asked to work with individuals and groups to improve performance.  It is assumed we have and can impart some type of expertise that will be one of the causal factors of this improved performance.  In doing this we would be adding value and in our proof driven organizations this [...]

A Dark Side to Systems Thinking

Over the past number of months I have been following (and in some cases contributing) to discussions on a number of LinkedIn groups that focus on systems thinking.  Many of these groups have hundreds or even thousands of members. Personally, after many years of working with systems thinking I no longer find the concept of [...]