There's a common manifestation of "The Expert" in every field--one who has allowed the weight of their accumulated knowledge and experience to drag them down into an unfortunate state of certainty. The Expert has gained so much confidence in their field and craft that they see themselves as qualified, empowered, and even obligated to make … Continue reading Expertise as Limiting; Uncertainty as Enabling
https://youtu.be/ACkoVBnwaaw Script: For the next 20 minutes, I want to introduce you to a little bit of theory, and it might come across as somewhat abstract, maybe extremely abstract, but I have found some of these concepts extremely useful in understanding why the old paradigms and our default problem solving and sense-making methods often don't … Continue reading Why the Old Paradigms Don’t Work & Introduction to Cynefin (Video + Script)
https://youtu.be/btSxtF5nwio Transcript:In the book Design Unbound by Ann Pendleton Jullian and John Seely Brown I was recently introduced to the idea of society existing and evolving on multiple levels of organization, and David Ronfeldt’s TIMn framework. TIMn stands for Tribes, Institutions, Markets, and Networks. In early history, society only existed at the tribal level. Tribes … Continue reading The TIM^n Framework (video + script)
Allow me to be transparent in a way that might make all of us uncomfortable. Over the course of the year that I worked at my last unit, I felt quite unaligned to their strategy and culture. I struggled to pin down who, what, and why we were, consistently coming up short. I was (very generously) handed a job that … Continue reading Alignment: Artifacts and Rituals
Imagine you’ve ventured deep into a mountainous landscape. Picture that in every direction are miles and miles of hills and mountains, varying in elevation from tiny hillocks to majestic alps... Now imagine that your goal is to find the highest peak possible... but visibility is extremely poor. It’s so foggy, you can’t see what’s beyond … Continue reading The Art of Wandering Downhill
A little over a year ago, we were on another of our family adventures, having taken the long route to Germany, with stops along the way at Liberty Science center in New Jersey, Hever Castle in Kent, England, the Colosseum in Rome, a series of tunnels 40 meters under Naples, Italy, a few flights, a … Continue reading How to Know if it is Raining
Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash Link to audio version On Wednesday of that week, I was certain that if the opportunity still existed four days later, on Sunday night, I would be boarding a flight from Honolulu to Austin. At the same time, I was growing increasingly agitated seeing some leaders try to publicly minimize the seriousness … Continue reading Tree Care For Forest-Viewers
"The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little." - Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow The human brain does certain things spectacularly well. Some things it does so well that it can actually present a … Continue reading Patterns Everywhere
The still slowly unfolding catastrophe of COVID-19 and the failures from some world leaders to adequately respond to early weak signals demonstrate a few crucial truths that any leader, facilitator, and innovator ought to understand: We are prone to thinking linearly, especially without a rudimentary understanding of complexity. Emergent phenomena within complex systems often scale … Continue reading COVID-19 Lessons for Leaders
Sounding Slightly Off 