I’ve been thinking and reading a lot lately about different ways of doing stuff. By ‘stuff’ I mainly mean (1) ways in which change is achieved, and (2) ways in which work is organised.
I thought it might be useful to put the most influential things I’ve been reading in one place – partly for my own reference, and partly for others to have a look at the source information if they so wish – so that’s what I’ve done below. It’s arranged into two lists (achieving change, organising work) and I’ll update it as and when.
Achieving change
- Beyond belief – towards a new methodology of change (Matthew Taylor)
- Collective Impact (SSIR) – “The social sector is filled with examples of partnerships, networks, and other types of joint efforts. But collective impact initiatives are distinctly different. Unlike most collaborations, collective impact initiatives involve a centralized infrastructure, a dedicated staff, and a structured process that leads to a common agenda, shared measurement, continuous communication, and mutually reinforcing activities among all participants.”
- Channeling Change – making Collective Impact work (SSIR)
- The dawn of system leadership (SSIR) and my own reflections on how system leadership helps us move beyond ‘just’ top-down and bottom-up change
- Systems leadership – synthesis (overview) paper (pdf) (Virtual Staff College) and “A view from the bridge” (Sue Goss)
- Complex isn’t the same as complicated (Mark Foden)
- The basic principles of strategy haven’t changed in 30 years (HBR)
- Charismatic, chameleonic or institutional ideas? (Chris Hatton)
- Anarchists in the Boardroom: more like people (Liam Barrington-Bush)
- Scaling across, not just up – “Locality does scale via network, rather than via hierarchy”
Organising work
- How to become a soulful organisation (Frederic Laloux) (see also his book Reinventing Organisations)
- Misperceptions of self-management and Five crucial components of self-management (closely linked to systems leadership above)
- Rebooting accountability: from top-down to AA (Cormac Russell)
- Making absolutely boring and absolutely needed meetings better (HBR)
- The paradoxes of organisation – “Paradoxes can be clues to understanding deep and abiding conflicts, and confronting them directly may sometimes help in the search for resolutions.”
- Skills in flux (David Brooks) – “People with social courage are extroverted in issuing invitations but introverted in conversation… They build not just contacts but actual friendships by engaging people on multiple levels. If you’re interested in a new field, they can reel off the names of 10 people you should know. They develop large informal networks of contacts that transcend their organization and give them an independent power base…. [Other types of people] possess negative capacity, the ability to live with ambiguity and not leap to premature conclusions. They can absorb a stream of disparate data and rest in it until they can synthesize it into one trend, pattern or generalization.”
- Invisibles: the power of anonymous work in an age of relentless self-promotion (David Zweig)
- Two cultures in public services
- We can’t know everything and should act accordingly
arbitrary constant 