March has been busy with the extraordinary work that Dr Vu is doing remotely in Vietnam, and in finishing our latest book, S&T Happens: Surviving and Thriving in a VUCA World. I still managed to get a few blog posts out in English, and I starting to do some in Vietnamese. No I don’t speak Tiếng Việt. I copy Cherry’s best Facebook posts. Here is one: COVID SAU 2 NĂM NHÌN LẠI… Meanwhile, in English:
Some posts were theoretical:
An essential element of psychological safety is a blameless culture.
Here is a wonderful interview with Frederic Laloux. He has been a huge influence on us at Teal Unicorn (it’s in our name: the concept of “teal” comes from Laloux’s book Reinventing Organizations, a must read for the 2020s). I summarise some of the key points of the interview in this post.
In evolving to stakeholder value, I think there are two logical steps: moving our focus from owner to customer, then to employee.
I stirred up a tea-cup-storm with this one: Those who think about knowledge work love models, preferably drawn as wheels or quadrants. We generate vast numbers of them. They’re not terribly useful.
And some were practical:
The most important thing a manager ever does is make hiring decisions (in places where they still do that). Nothing else has the same long term impact on an organisation, for good or ill.
So why do we rely on brief samples and instinct? Can we agree that hiring processes are unreliable in determining a good fit for both parties? The best model I have heard of is a multi-month trial period.
Readers know I’m constantly talking with and observing Dr Vu to capture her secrets of success. I’ve just updated the page about it. Recent work she is doing at two clients makes it clear that she is using the diverge-converge model in her workshops.
We talk about CC Ritual but we have never defined it online. Here is an extract from our book, The agile Manager (small a).