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The art and science of the possible

~ A celebration of non-zero sum thinking

The art and science of the possible

Category Archives: Crisis

When competence is offensive

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by lnedelescu in business, consulting, Crisis, management, problem solving

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

business, incompetence, management consulting, office politics, power games

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I remember vividly a meeting that took place a few years ago. I was a management consultant tasked by the owner of a large corporation with overseeing the creation of a new profit and loss business unit. My nemesis was a Vice President who did not want to see his power and “territorial” claims diminished by the new venture. Typical power games and office politics were very much at play. The owner liked to delegate and had a “survival of the fittest mentality” to mediating conflict.

The three of us had gotten together because the named Vice President was overtly sabotaging my efforts. He was making the case to the owner that, while the idea of the new business unit was great, the consultant was poorly fit for the job.

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Measuring our way into meaninglessness, stagnation and crisis

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by lnedelescu in Crisis, future, human capital, innovation, problem solving, science

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bureaucracy, Crisis, Data Crunching, economics, Fanatism, future, Kurzweil, neo-Marxism, Numbers, Religion, Singularity, Society, Stagnation, Totalitarianism

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I posit excessive measurement is the culprit behind the world’s biggest problems, as well as the likely initiator of its future crises. It is the largest hidden systemic risk to our future livelihood. Our obsession with quantity is the very incarnation of the materialistic credo, a worldview focusing on physical resources and antagonist to a knowledge economy.

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Modern society as an inertial machine

18 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by lnedelescu in Crisis, future, human capital, learning, society, technology

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Answers, Conspiracy Theory, effectiveness, Efficiency, Idiosyncrasies, Machine, Questions, Recruitment, Skills, Society, Talent, Technology

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Conspiracy theories vs. idiosyncrasies

I for one am no big fan of conspiracy theories. I see them as the construct of minds unable to grasp modern life’s intricacies. The fact that few of us manage to agree within the same family leaves me suspicious as to the proliferation of occult groups with the coherence to pull the world’s strings – that is assuming they would possess the means. I have however become convinced that society doesn’t need conspiracies to create its own self-imposed idiosyncrasies which in turn come with a hefty price.

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Understanding how politics works could help move us forward and avoid political stand-stills

03 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in Crisis, democracy, knowledge, society

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Double Loop Learning, Emotions, Logic, politics, Progress, Society

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So we’ve all been assisting to the political circus in D.C. over the last few days. Which prompted me to write a brief piece about how I think politics works. My hope is that shedding some light on the dynamics governing the politician-electorate relationship can help raise the bar for the political construct which seems to have sunk quite low as of late.

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Life lessons – on compromise and conflict, and the importance of chemistry

25 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in Crisis, Organizational Development, Uncategorized

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compromise, conflict, Crisis, organizational chemistry

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Compromise when you can, but accept that sometimes conflict is unavoidable.

Conflict is always lurking, only a well articulated opinion away. But sometimes conflict is irrational, it has nothing to do with what one thinks or does. Conflict can appear simply because of the way someone is reflects badly by contrast on what someone else is not.

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What’s beyond the knowledge economy shouldn’t scare anyone

22 Saturday Jun 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in capitalism, complexity, Crisis, future, human capital, society, technology

≈ 1 Comment

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automation, Buckminster Fuller, jobs, Knowledge Economy, Kurzweil, labor, Society, specialization, technological singularity

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The love-hate relationship of humanity with technology seems to be universal across ages. We love the benefits that technology brings, but hate it when it threatens our jobs, or forces us to learn new skills faster than our comfortable pace.

In the words of Clayton Christensen, one could say that technology is slowly disrupting human labor (and I include here knowledge work). The latest scare for humanity is the so called “technological singularity”, where artificial intelligence learns how to design improved versions of itself, and so exponentially surpasses human intelligence, leaving us humans well…irrelevant. Popular author Kurzweil predicts the year for this around 2045. Less extreme viewpoints still see automation as a major disruptive force to social order as even knowledge workers will be out of jobs in the next few decades. And so the fatalists wonder: how do we deal with the social implications of a few billion unemployed – will anarchy be the norm in 2045?

While the logical thread leading to a fatalist view of the future may seem sound, it is in fact plagued with serious flaws based in a misunderstanding of the differences between silicon and carbon-based intelligence.

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Why it may take crisis to become a better integrative thinker

17 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in business, Crisis, design thinking

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Creative Tension, Crisis, integrative thinking, problem solving, Roger Martin, Short Term vs. Long term

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They say mistakes are key to learning. Having had my share, I couldn’t agree more. But I would say while mistakes are great learning experiences, crises exercise a unique mental capacity for (wicked) problem solving: integrative thinking.

Roger Martin defines integrative thinking as the “ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative solution of the tensions in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but is superiors to each”.

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The rising toll of the (still) predominant mechanistic mindset in a complex world

11 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in complexity, Crisis, democracy, future, society

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causality, Cause and Effect, Charles Handy, complexity, David Hurst, democracy, Ecology, future, Mechanistic, Mindset, Resilience, Robustness, Society, Thinking

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Thesis: there is I believe a meta-societal, global shift from robustness to resilience (see this for an intuitive illustration of the difference). This is fueled by an underlying transition from a mechanistic (Industrial Revolution) to a complex-adaptive (Conceptual Economy) worldview.  We have managed to design robust systems (economy, air traffic, healthcare, energy), but not resilient. Robust systems are great for quasi-stable environments, but the price for not having resilience in highly dynamic, networked environments is staggering: $12 trillion for the 2008 financial crisis, and counting. Unless we learn how to design resilient systems, likely through the application of complexity principles, democracy itself may be at risk.

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Why the “individuality disorder” is the great tacit crisis of our times and how complexity informed management can help resolve it

18 Saturday May 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in business, Communication, complexity, Crisis, future, human capital, management, Organizational Development, paradox, philosophy, society

≈ 1 Comment

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Ackoff, Ambiguity, Black Swans, business, complexity, Corporations, Disorder, Dissonance, Drucker Forum 2013, False Comfort, future, Hamel, Hollnagel, Humanity, Individuality, Industrial Revolution, management, Organizational Development, paradox, philosophy, Predictability, Professional Fulfillment, Resilience, Resonance, Scale, Snowden, Society, Taleb, Variance, Wall Street

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With all the benefits derived from the advances in standard of living, our modern society suffers from an apparent paradox which can be best paraphrased as “if everyone is special, then no one is”.

We strive for individuality even as the economic affluence required to express ourselves is increasingly tied to economies of scale and the uniformity they foster. We do our best to proclaim our uniqueness to the world on social media pages, but have to make use of highly standardized templates in the process. We share in the belief (and rightfully so) that the very success of our modern society depends on scale, yet it is precisely scale that appears to generate confusion when it comes to the most intimate aspects of our human identity.

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Severe business crisis turn-around: turning vicious “tailspins” into virtuous dynamics

13 Monday May 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in business, consulting, Crisis, strategy

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business, Business Development, Crisis Turnaround, Recovery, Risk, Selectivity, strategy, Tailspin, Vicious vs. Virtuous Cycles

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Just like aviation seems to have mastered the science of stable flight, so does business look stable and predictable from afar. But at a closer look tailspins are never far-away and remain a possibility. Many companies don’t go out of business over prolonged periods of decline, but rather suddenly. The warning signs for a vicious cycle are there, but the signals are usually weak and management overlooks them until it is too late. At that point revenue spirals downward, less money is available to pursue new business resulting in a reduced probability of getting business, and the enterprise is headed straight for a spectacular crash.

I will save the details for how a company enters tailspin for another blog, but here I want to focus on the key strategy to recover from vicious cycles, and even turn them around into virtuous ones.

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business capitalism Communication complexity consulting Crisis democracy design thinking Emerging Markets future human capital innovation Investment knowledge learning management Organizational Development paradox philosophy problem solving sales science society strategy taxonomy technology Uncategorized

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