Culture

Bring out powerful stories with jumpstart storytelling

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Shared stories lift people’s enthusiasm, motivation and capability for their shared purpose. Jumpstart storytelling is a simple but effective way to bring out the most powerful stories in a group. I have used jumpstart storytelling in groups focused on improving the public service, exploring Internet issues and to review learnings from other sessions. I will explain […]

Culture

Creating constructive relationships between cultural subgroups

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Innovation thrives on creative tension, but conflict can equally destroy productivity and make life miserable. The different perspectives that people bring to a problem often stem from a culture long-established in their organisation or specialist community. Tensions can arise across different ways of seeing the World. Here are some practical ideas for maintaining constructive relationships between groups […]

Culture

Culture and strategy eat breakfast together

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I am sure you have heard the phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Its worthy intention is to remind us that a strong culture is important to getting things done in organisations. We know that even with a great strategy, a destructive culture makes it really hard for people to do their jobs. What the phrase […]

Culture

A customer-centric approach to founder-alignment

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One of the main causes of  team failure is team members with misaligned goals. If the co-founders or team members want similar things, they will pull in a similar direction. If their goals are misaligned, they won’t. The longer it takes to discover conflicting vision and motivation among team members, the more painful the breakup […]

Culture

Forget about engagement. Think about participation.

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Recently I noticed myself using the word “engage” a lot. I was engaging this person and those people. I even thought maybe what I do is “stakeholder engagement”. Then I realised I had this badly wrong. The whole idea of “engaging” people is self-contradictory. An oxymoron. In government, NGOs and even business, we make decisions […]

Culture

Collaboration is voluntary

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Perhaps you know the old joke: How many social workers does it take to change a lightbulb? One, but only if the lightbulb wants to change. People often ask me how I make people collaborate. I can’t, of course. And neither can you or anyone else. People collaborate when they want to, when they feel […]