Tag Archives: making elephants tapdance

No battleplan survives contact with the enemy…

Posted on August 19, 2012 by dwighttowers

…disruption is what happens when the plans we thought we had have suddenly changed. It could be a major economic collapse – a black swan event – or something so small as your bus left early. How we respond to … Continue reading →

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How many managers does it take to change a light bulb?

Posted on August 26, 2011 by dwighttowers

‘Going forward, we’ve formed a task force to study the problem of why light bulbs burn out, and produce a cutting edge plan laying out what, exactly, we as supervisors can do to make the bulbs work smarter, not harder.”

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The Shadow Knows

Posted on August 23, 2011 by dwighttowers

I first encountered the phrase “Shadow Organisation” in Mark Pelling’s 2011 “Adaptation and Climate Change: From resilience to transformation” However, the generation of novel ideas or practices that are in conflict with or undervalued by canonical organisation often first emerges from the … Continue reading →

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Bureaucracy versus Adhocracy?

Posted on June 4, 2011 by dwighttowers

Well, this was new to me. (from wikipedia) Adhocracy is a type of organization that operates in opposite fashion to a bureaucracy. The term was first popularized in 1970 by Alvin Toffler,[1] and has since become often used in the … Continue reading →

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Abba and the agentic deadlock

Posted on April 26, 2011 by dwighttowers

Abba needs no introduction. Agentic deadlock, well, see here and here‘s a youtube video (another, hopefully better one, to follow) I’ve been reading a couple of books on the changes that are needed and the difficulty of making them. The … Continue reading →

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Larissa Behrendt on Indigenous Disadvantage

Posted on March 17, 2011 by dwighttowers

Attention Conservation Notice: Larissa Behrendt, a professor of Law at University of Technology, Sydney gave a short, sharp and superb talk (see disclaimer at bottom of this tl;dr post) in Melbourne about some of the harmful rhetoric around Indigenous Affairs. … Continue reading →

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