Posts Tagged ‘Emotional’

Burning Platforms

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

Before yesterday, I’d never, to my recollection, heard the phrase ‘burning platform’ used in a business conversation. Yesterday I heard it used multiple times in two different conversations, with teams in two different businesses, in two different parts of the U.S., to refer to issues they are addressing.

A pattern defines a game.

This is what a burning platform looks like:

BurningPlatform1

What’s the story here? Well, let’s see…it’s an environmental disaster…lives are no doubt endangered (many have already escaped in lifeboats, jumped or been killed (e.g. ‘fired’)…the focus is on containment instead of productivity…the PR spinning is beginning…a hundred lawyers are circling…Wall Street is manipulating markets based on shareholder emotions…the media is fanning the fear…the government is organizing committees that will haunt and impede productivity for years to come…cities, states and municipalities are seeking reparations. Whatever good can emerge from this mess will be years, maybe a generation, in coming.

Metaphors like ‘burning platform’ represent a level of meaning that accompanies all communication, the Meta level. (The other two are Cosmetic and Emotional). The Meta level contains metaphor, symbolism, allegory, parable, analogies, etc. Meta meaning is powerful stuff and should be chosen with great care. It’s why brands work so hard, at such great expense, on their identity. Those symbols mean a lot.

At GameChangers, we practice what I call the science of narrative. This science requires specific, deliberate and objective choices about what metaphors we put into play.

The Center for Public Policy and Administration defined the phrase ‘burning platform’ in 2005. ‘Burning platform’ according to the CPPA, came into meaning when a driller on a burning offshore oil-drilling platform calculated that his best chance of survival was a 150-foot jump that he’d never make under normal conditions. A burning platform came to mean an ‘urgent condition requiring bold choices.’ All good, and useful. Context is huge, however, and after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the context for this phrase changed and, along with it, its meaning. Now it means ‘unmitigated disaster.’

Look at the photo again. That’s the image of a burning platform most of your audience will conjure when this phrase is used. Whatever changes come about because of the pictured scenario promise to be painful, litigious, lengthy and costly. This is not what we want when we change the game. We want change that is productive, agreeable, fast and inexpensive to implement.

Clearly, we need a new metaphor to capture this meaning.

It’s like that old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon intro, where Bullwinkle pulls a monster out of a hat and says “No doubt about it, I’ve gotta get another hat.”

We’ve gotta get another hat.

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Posted in Agreement Principle, Communication, Environment, Levels of Meaning, Metaphor, Narrative, Photos & Videos, Problem Solving, Scenes, Speed, story | 2 Comments »

Letter from an Angry Mother

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Dear Children,

I know you are busy with your lives and your careers and such, and you know I’m not one to meddle or nag.  Live and let live, that’s my motto.  But as your Mother I’ve got to tell you that your behavior lately has been hurtful to me, and to the rest of our family. You seem to have forgotten that I am a living, breathing being, with real feelings. And right now my feelings are hurt. Badly.

I held you in my arms.  Fed you.  Gave you a nice home. Helped you grow into the people you are today. I guess I have failed, because the people you are today have wounded me.  I want to scream.  Sometimes I do scream.  Of course you don’t hear me, you only hear what’s coming out of your own mouths. How about listening for a change?

I made it possible for you to get an education, so you can do whatever it is you do for a living (I still don’t understand it!???) and yet you take me for granted.  Like I am nothing to you.  This is the treatment I deserve?  This is your response to a lifetime of love?

I do not ask for your thanks.  A Mother’s job is a thankless one.  I accept that.  Spare me the holidays.  Show me some appreciation, that’s all.  I will not be ignored! I will not go gently into the night!!!

How about I cut off your inheritance? You have no idea how close I am to doing it.  You’ve already blown through most of what I intended to leave you, anyway.  Take, take, take, and never give back, that’s you.

If you’re not going to show me respect, I promise you I’ll start taking back what’s rightfully mine.  How did you like it when I took back that piece of Japan last month? That hurt, didn’t it?  You felt that, didn’t you?  It is just the beginning of where this thing is headed unless you get your act together.

At one time, the family owned a million or more varieties of apples, did you know that?  What are we down to now?  Six?  Seven?  It took me ages to save up my precious minerals collection.  You walked off with it, and you’re not bringing it back, you think I don’t notice? It took me 10 million years to build the family oil business, and you’re going to blow through it in a couple of measly centuries?  Some nerve.  Frack me?  No, frack you!!!

The Dodo was my favorite tsotchke , you probably didn’t know that, did you?  Of course you didn’t, because it’s always all about you.  I loved that animal, it made me laugh every time I looked at it, and then you broke it.  I miss my Dodo.  It was one of a kind.  It cannot be replaced.  Too late for an apology.  Don’t even try.  I’m not forgiving you for that one.

Mustard gas?  That any children of mine would make such a thing is one of my greatest heartaches.  Agent Orange?  First of all, I resent like hell that you named it after one of my favorite fruits.  Second, I still have a rash in Southeast Asia, one of the most beautiful parts of my body (one of the few I have left) because of it.  Asbestos?  Awful stuff.  Zylon B? If only it were the bad science fiction it sounds like, instead of the awful reality it was. Still gives me nightmares. And then to top it all off, you take innocent little hydrogen, and turn him into a weapon?!! Honest to Gaia, where do you learn such things?  Who are your friends?

Chernobyl?  Nuclear reactors and vodka? That was a bright idea. First, you poison me with  radiation, then you invite tourists to see the results?  Why?  So you and your kids can laugh at the featherless geese?  Have the geese not been humiliated enough?  (Yes, they have!)

Is anyone ever going to take responsibility for the mess you made in Bophal? Someone did it, and someone is going to clean it up, and we are going to wait right here until that happens, I don’t care how long it takes. And if one of you doesn’t own up to it, all of you will.

How is that cancer thing working out for you? Nobody had cancer before you brought it home, we didn’t even know what the stuff was. Now we can’t get rid of it. What’s the matter with the genes I gave you?  Nothing is ever good enough for you, is it? You’re weaving a tangled web, that’s all I can say. What are those hard red things you call tomatoes, anyway?  The corn was just fine until you came along. What is so bad about four teats on a cow? Why must you try to make six? Stop meddling with my DNA! It’s my responsibility. Keep your noses out of it!

PlanetEarth2Another thing—my air conditioner isn’t working. Why? Because I have you for children, that’s why. You broke it with your incessant smoking, and I don’t see you offering to fix it. Fine! Tell the police they’ll find my body in the kitchen, propped against the open refrigerator, where I went to get one last breath before my lungs turned to ash.

My water!  What has happened to my beautiful water? I turn my back for a minute, and you’ve dumped so much of your crap into it that all I hear is complaints from the other family members. The dolphins and whales won’t shut up about it. The salmon don’t spawn like they used to.  The octopi are pissed.  I’m not even going to go into what the plants have to say. I’ll say it for them. Thanks for nothing!!!

Have you no idea how much pain I am in?  I’m sick.  Last year I had a leak in my gulf that didn’t let up for months, and my turtles and birds are still hurting.  I get the cold sweats.  I cry for no apparent reason, until I can’t cry any more. The doctors don’t know what’s causing the vomiting, which I do with awful regularity.  My nausea is the only constant of my existence.

You have hollowed me out.  Drained me.  The only feelings I have toward you are angry ones.  Maybe venting like this is what it will take to get your attention, or make me feel better anyway.

Don’t make me lose my temper!  The last time I lost my temper, I killed the dinosaurs, you know.  That was me.  Boom!  Just like that. Gone in a heartbeat. It was an accident.  The Creator slugged me and I slugged back, and the poor dinosaurs got in the way.  I am not a cruel woman, as you often claim (don’t tell me you don’t, I’ve read your diaries!!!)  Anger can be a cruel thing, though, the reason being you never know who’s going to get hurt by it. The dinosaurs happened to get caught in the middle of a quarrel between me and the Creator and that was that.  You do not want a repeat of that scene, I promise you.  Or maybe you do.  Maybe we’re going to find out.  That’s how angry I am.  Your behavior is a slap in my face, and don’t think I won’t slap back. I will. Promise.

You’re the only species that has made a practice of killing your own kind, did you know that?  The rest of the family are disgusted by this. To make matters worse, you glorify it in your games and your stories like it’s a good thing.  I hang my head. When I think that children of mine are doing this, I want to die. I do.

You cannot leave your spent rods and your empty drums and your plastic gyres lying around the house like it’s the morning after a frat party and not expect to suffer the consequences!

You cannot not pump me full of your potions like I’m some daft heiress you’re poisoning for her dowry and expect to get away with it!

You cannot not take what is mine and pretend it is yours without waking up someday to the reality that you are a generation of thieves!

Here’s an idea for you.  Leave!  Move out of the house!  If this is the way you’re going to treat me, take your smokestacks off the roof and your jet skis out of the driveway and get out!  The rest of us can use the room. The coyotes would be happy to have your bedroom.  Do you think the trees care whether or not we have cable?  Probably not.

You are my Children, and this should not have to be our relationship. Truly, though, I am at my wits end, at a loss for what to do about the horrible way you are treating me.

Please do better.  There’s still time to heal these wounds, but not a lot.

Love,

Your Mother

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Posted in Character, Emotion, Environment, Games, Listening, Narrative, Relationships, Scenes, Themes | No Comments »

Scott Avidon offers $25,000 for a job lead

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

ScottAvidon1

This came across the Huffington Post yesterday.  I love Scott Avidon’s approach to a job search.  It is generous and ingenious.  It reminds me of our friend Erick Brownstein’s cousin, Alec, who got a job as an art director in NYC by buying the names of all big agency Creative Directors as Google keywords, so that when they Googled their own names, his C.V. was in the top five results.

In his ‘brand narrative,’ Avidon does a good job of communicating on the meta level, and he speaks well on the emotional level, too.  The images he uses on his job search blog are pure meta, not the least of which is the fact that his own image is balanced with the other five.  It suggests a balanced life.  But not TOO balanced.  Avidon, an industrial designer by training, has laid out the page so that the images and the program description near the bottom are justified left while the rest of the content on the page is centered.  It doesn’t matter whether this is Avidon’s conscious design or an accident, it’s brilliant,  because it uses the meta meaning in design to communicate the INCOMPLETENESS of the narrative.  Something’s missing.  Something we, in the audience, naturally want to fill.  We are coded as human beings to strive for completeness, and the incompleteness on Avidon’s page gets us leaning forward, into his narrative, as a result.

As a systems thinker, Avidon has plugged, somehow, into the HuffPost network in order to expand his narrative in a quantum way that is of his doing, but is now, by his design, out of his control.  His work now consists of channeling the chaos that ensues.  This is good narrative science, and conjures up something that cannot be present in a flat resume.  Energy, vitality, generosity, creativity, dimensional thinking.

Compare Avignon’s narrative to a typical job query or resume, which is primarily cosmetic: information, facts, history, data points, objectives. There’s no comparison.

Employers today are looking to invest in personal narratives, in trajectories, and in generative, ‘Yes-And’ thinking.  Companies hire individuals who can make good moves when faced by unforeseen circumstances.  Who share their own success with their team.  Who can be engines of newness and positive change.  That you’re knowledgeable at what you do is just table stakes that can get in the game, maybe.  Whether or not you can change the game in your favor is what really counts

I hear Oblong Industries is hiring.  They need Scott Avidon on their team.

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Posted in Branding, Communication, Creativity, Emotion, Narrative, Networked World, Problem Solving, story | 1 Comment »

Is Social Useless?

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

A response to Spencer Fry of Carbonmade, who recently posted a blog entry entitled: “Down With Social–Social is Immeasurable and a Waste of Time.”

Quantum1ASpencer, I agree to this extent:  The phrase ‘Social Media’ is so amorphous as to be essentially meaningless.  In fact, all media are social.  It’s like saying Wooden Tree, or Feathered Bird.

The most social medium is sexual intimacy, followed (if we’re talking relevance; preceded if we’re talking chronology) by meaningful face-to-face conversations, scaling out from there, and eventually reaching the nebulous netherworld of thoughtless Likes, meaningless Tweets and snarky YouTube comments.  Noise.  Cosmetic data with no emotional or meta resonance.

What’s usually ignored in conversations about Social Media platforms is the Science of Narrative.  Narrative is the force that makes media meaningful.  Narrative may not make the world go round, but it describes for us why and how it does.  It provides context for information that would otherwise appear as random.  The reason social messaging echos and evaporates is that it’s not connecting with a narrative.  (A hashtag or a mention does not a narrative make!)

The most relevant aspect of Social Media will turn out to be the lens it afford us with which to perceive narratives.  We are, I believe, at a stage in the history of narratology that parallels where physics was at the turn of the last century, when the science moved from the Newtonian to the Quantum.

Marketers who use social media as you have described it, as a fashion statement, are doomed to keep firing blanks at a target they cannot see.  They are using Industrial Aged models to engage in a Networked environment.  It’s like trying to split an atom with a pendulum.

Those who use it as a lens on narrative, will be able to direct ‘particles of meaning’ at the quantum narrative made visible by social technologies and capture the massive energy predictably released by these interactions.

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Posted in Communication, Emotion, Issues, Narrative, Networked World, story | 1 Comment »

Los Mineros, Part Two

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

A serial analysis of the quest to rescue 33 miners trapped 2,300 feet underground in a copper mine outside Copiapo, Chile…

TCMG2Levels of Meaning

With the eyes of the news media fixed on one very specific location, everything about the Los Mineros narrative is tightly focused and vividly portrayed.  There’s no mystery to it, no hidden agenda (with maybe the exception of a mining company looking to avoid liability, which itself would be no surprise).  With the focus so intense right now on the mine itself and the rescue efforts, almost every element of the narrative is visible even to a distant observer like me, who might check the story every day or two on the webs to see how the miners are doing.

It is extremely clear how the narrative is conveyed on three distinct Levels of Meaning.

All communication happens on three levels:  Cosmetic (data, information, quantification, surface descriptions, neutral language), Emotional (passion, mood, empathy, attitude, ups, downs) and Meta (symbolism, context, iconography, metaphor, perspective, interpretation, the subconscious connections).

Observe, and learn from, how the Los Mineros narrative is conveyed on these three levels:

Cosmetic: Tons of information here. Plans and backup plans described in detail.  The three four-inch pipes that have become their lifeline.  The NASA psychologists who’ve arrived to help.  The number of calories they’re eating every day (2,000), and how much water they’re supposed to drink every day (5 litres).  We know about the ’super drill’ being brought in to bore through the rock.  This early in the story, there’s still a lot of cosmetic meaning to be conveyed, an abundance of factual information.  Expect that, at some point, this level of meaning will begin to lose steam, and that the tellers of the story will begin to place more emphasis on the other two levels.

Emotional: As always, this is where the most meaning resides, where the story is most potent, and touches us most profoundly.  We know that some of Los Mineros have been depressed.  We know that they have been able to communicate with their families.  They have shared their frustration.  We feel their claustrophobia.  They have begun to play roles, and these will rouse emotions, too.  Who will give the pep talks?  Who can get them to smile?  Keeping their emotions positive will be key to their mental health during their ordeal, and so, the longer the ordeal goes on, the more crucial the emotional content of the narrative will become.

Meta: The video feed is an existential lifeline.  “I video, therefore I am.”  For this reason, its very existence is a hopeful symbol.  The handsomer guys are getting more facetime on camera.  Stars of the narrative, those who can best hold our attention, will emerge as the Cosmetic flow slows.  Bringing in the NASA psychologists to deal with the miners’ prolonged isolation is a recognition of the global significance of the narrative, and it ennobles Los Mineros by equating them with astronauts, Los Astronautas, and to the heroic qualities we ascribe them.  This blog post is, itself, meta communication about the rescue effort.

Sometimes uncovering the Meta language requires digging beneath the surface, because beneath the surface is where the Meta meaning works.  For example the number of miners, 33, has deep meta significance in the predominantly Catholic country of Chile, because 33 is commonly believed to be Jesus Christ’s age when he died on the cross.  When Los Mineros finally walk into the light, the date on the calendar will not matter, they’ll be celebrating Easter in Chile.

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Posted in Character, Communication, Emotion, Narrative | 2 Comments »

Be Nice to the Mice

Monday, January 4th, 2010

The end of the year, the decade, passed fitfully, at times stressfully, with no pause for reflection, and no Resolution for the New Year except the fairly vague intention of being more Resolute. What to be resolute about? That was still the question.

And then this article by Errol Morris in the New York Times came across the network this morning, the hook being a quote from Walt Disney (”I only hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing — that It Was All Started By A Mouse.“) as its headline. I’d already seen the link a couple of times when Howard Green from Disney Studios called to invite me to a tribute for Walt’s recently-departed nephew, Roy Disney, on Sunday at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood.   Suddenly the universe was in my ear bigtime, whispering that I had to click on the link to the Morris article. Something was there to be discovered….

The article itself is a photo essay and dialogue with photojournalist Ben Curtis about the forensics of war photography, the context of image vs. imagemaker, the technological challenges and dangers that come with altering photos to create propaganda or enhance a certain point of view. The kind of stuff in which Morris specializes. After I got the context, I began skimming. But I kept coming back to a photo by Curtis that led off the article:MMWarPhoto1

In seeing the photo, I found what had been missing over the holidays. I might have decided to be resolute, I was still waffling on a theme, what, exactly I’d be resolute about. This photo resolved that. I wrote the following Comment on the Morris piece:

Errol

As our old friend Onosko, who worked at the House of Mouse for many years, might have said, you’re making it more complicated than it is. Focusing on the cosmetic level of communication–the toy itself, the shards of glass, the smoke, the interaction between imagemaker and image–is a fascinating narrative, and yields neverending complexity, but this complexity obscures meaning instead of bringing it to light. How Mickey got there is not nearly as important as the meta and emotional levels of the communication: War’s awfulest tragedies are its children.

Until we begin thinking of children first–begin with the Mice!, that what Walt would’ve done–War will be an adult theme park where children get crippled, grow old and perish before their time.

And so, finally, thanks to Howard and Errol and Ben, I have it — my New Year’s theme — the thing I can be Resolute about:  Be Nice to the Mice.

Hit it, Kid!

BabyDrummer1

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Posted in Communication, Emotion, Narrative, Photos & Videos, Themes | No Comments »

The Worst Billboard in L.A.

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

I entered the arena this week all snarky and snarling, as if awakening from a tryptophan coma. It didn’t help Monday morning when what was supposed to be an 11-minute hold to speak with Bank of America’s service people about a problem we were having with our online banking turned into 45 minutes.  One must find a healthy outlet for one’s darker moods, a way to vent.  Yoga can lift the clouds. So can playing the guitar, a strenuous workout, or a good long laugh.   Writing and the arts are good tonic, too, creativity being a prime refuge for malcontents from the beginning of time.  The caveperson who did the drawings on the walls of the caves at Lascaux was probably a lousy hunter, got ridiculed for it, and found that drawing on the walls with a burnt stick was good therapy.

In the interest of venting creatively, let’s talk about why this billboard on south La Brea Avenue is the worst billboard in Los Angeles.IMG_6111

Naturally there are a lot of unsold screenplays around town, just like there are a lot of unsold cars in Detroit, billions of  lines of unused code in Silicon Valley, and a legion of uncaught lobsters off the coast of Maine.   It’s a company town, and this is what happens in company towns.  Inventory gets stockpiled, and when the economy is troughing like it is now, it seems as if nothing moves off the shelves and more moves on all the time.  Besides, everyone who’s ever written for films or television can show you a trunkful of unsold scripts, manuscripts, treatments and pitches.  The bookshelves of every agent and D-person in the system are buckling under the weight of screenplays, spec pilot scripts and the galleys of unpublished novels to be pitched as film projects.  The titles of these projects are all written on the spines.  Occasionally you might see the name of a film that actually got made (”Memento”) a few that might have gotten made (”Naked Kill 3″???) and many, many more that you suspect will never get made (”Cletus the Fetus”).   So yes, cosmetically, the billboard states a kind of truth.  Most screenplays remain unsold.

Emotionally and metaphorically, however, this billboard is a terrible affront to  the industry, and to anyone who ever put their time and effort into writing a screenplay.  Here’s why:

Chase, the bank with all the ATMs, has never written a screenplay.    Chase has never stayed up late at night after the kids have gone to sleep, or gotten up extra early in the morning before work to  labor over a story in the longshot hope that the story will be the ticket out of a podunk town or a flatlining job.  Chase has never been so inspired by the lives of others or moved by the tide of human events that the urge to turn the experience into a screenplay, a movie, a grand statement about the way you feel about the world, is every bit as biological and undeniable as a seed’s drive to seek the sun.  Chase has never sat around with its college buddies, Citi, B of A, and Wells Fargo, and co-written the next big teen comedy, only to discover that nobody’s making teen comedies any more, the market has shifted practically overnight to RomComs.

Every one of those unsold screenplays was written by a human being with a dream, an idea, an inspiration.  Chase isn’t human.  Steinbeck put it this way in The Grapes of Wrath:  “The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”  This is what makes the billboard on La Brea such a monstrous offense to the industry it claims to court.  All those unsold screenplays are the hard-won badges of our humanity.  They are the flags that keep flying despite the hardships of battle.  They are the symbols of our striving, of our willingness to believe in our dreams, and confront the obstacles that stand between us and their realization.

As Christopher Walken might say, “If an actual person spoke to me like that billboard does, I’d stab them in the face with a soldering iron.”

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Posted in Branding, Communication, Emotion | 6 Comments »

Sing Everything

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

DaveCarroll1This story broke in the L.A. Times a couple of days ago and has been burning up the interwebs ever since.  Dave Carroll of the Canadian country music band Sons of Maxwell sings about a problem he has with United Airlines.  It’s easy to see how productive this game is for Carroll and the Sons of Maxwell, and how damaging it is to United Airlines, a brand that already has a pretty shabby reputation for dealing with passengers.  It is after all, the best customer complaint of the Networked Era.

There are three elements of gamechanging at work in Carroll’s United Breaks Guitars song (with two other ‘complaint songs’ to follow, according to Carroll): (more…)

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Posted in Branding, Emotion, Games, Narrative, Networked World, Objectives | 2 Comments »

Speaking the JiffyGas Language

Monday, January 26th, 2009

MarkJohnson1

One thing I always notice when I’m in a scene with Mark Johnson–the founder and President of JiffyGas and HConverters, complementary brands in the business of converting internal combustion engines to run on alt energy (hydrogen, nat gas, biofuels)–is how observant he is.  He notices everything.  When you’re speaking, he watches your hands, he glances at your feet, he looks you in the eye, he focuses on your thoughts even as they’re still taking shape in your mind.  When he speaks, he speaks with much more than the words coming out of his mouth.  Mark Johnson’s kind of communicating transcends spoken language.  Yes, words communicate, but only on the Cosmetic level.  It’s what accompanies those words on the Emotional and Meta levels that has the power to change the game.

JiffyGas1B

When Mark visited Los Angeles last month, and I got to watch Edwin and Armando, the whiz-bang mechanics he’d flown in from Colombia, convert a six-year-old Lexus to run on hydrogen, spoken language was maybe the least effective communications tool they used during the two days it took to do the conversion.   There were four languages being spoken in that shop in Alhambra–English, Spanish, Chinese, and Italian if you count the Italian narration on a DVD promo for the converter kit that Edwin ran for us on one of his computers.  Sure, some spoken language was required.  But what made the scene go–what got the team on the same page–in improvisation terms, what created the Group Mind–were the elements of communication that transcended words.   Here’s where Johnson’s genius as a communicator was clearly in evidence. (more…)

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Posted in Communication, Dialogue, Emotion | No Comments »

Improvise (Don’t Script) Your Training Scenarios

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

I sometimes answer business-related questions on LinkedIn that can be addressed with the principles of improvisation. This is one in a series of responses that was deemed ‘Best Answer’ by the questioner…

THE QUESTION: I have to run a workshop for a top management team that has recently adopted a new highly matrixed structure. As a result, there is a challenging amount of interdependence and ambiguity. While they have an understanding of the structure, very little work has been done on how it will operationalize, what operationalizing it will mean etc.

One of the activities I want the group to undertake is a scenario building exercise where they will build potential scenarios that will arise in the future, and then based on the scenarios, evolve in advance, an appropriate response to the scenario.

I have never run a Scenario Building activity before. Would appreciate if you could share:

a. A process for how to run it
b. Tips/Techniques
c. Do’s/Don’ts
d. Any other advice/input

Thanks in advance!

Gurprriet Siingh

THE ANSWER: The ‘highly matrixed structure’ you describe, Gurprriet, is in fact one small subset of a much more complex environment in which this management team will perform — and that is the Networked World. Because of the fluid, incredibly complex nature of these networks-within-networks, it is both impractical and impossible to run scenarios that can accurately predict any particular outcome. By the time you have created the scenario, run the scenario, analyzed the outcomes, then ratified and codified the outcomes, the environment will have changed, rendering the results irrelevant and passe’. (more…)

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Posted in Coaching, Communication, Education, Fundamentals, Networked World | No Comments »