Research & Resources
Our research is an invaluable source of latest thinking and guidance in key areas of learning, performance management, organisation development, talent and people strategy.
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October 15th 2019
Organisation Development Manifesto
The need for business-focused, expert Organisation Development (OD) capability has arguably never been greater than it is today. To survive and prosper over the long term, organisations must be capable of adapting to ever more rapid market and technological change.
- Tags
- HR & Organisation Effectiveness
- Organisation Development & Change
October 11th 2019
Culture Tool
Professor John Weeks, Professor of Organizational Behavior, IMD Business School introduced a tool to help leaders think about how they can be intentional about the way they shape the culture around them. The tool distinguishes between two types of change: talk-based change and behavior-based change. Both are important, but the talk-based part typically gets more attention. Talk-based change means making the case for the change: why this change and why now? How does the culture change connect to strategy and success? How can we create a sense of urgency and, equally important, a sense of opportunity for the change? Why is this change worth the sacrifice it will entail.
- Tags
- Culture
October 11th 2019
Agile Organizations, Not Just Teams
Amy discusses how teams don’t necessarily make for agile organisations. Amy argued in her session, teams alone are not sufficient to address the challenge of how to get diverse organisation components – each optimising their own business models, time horizons, technologies, and customer segments – to all fit together. To build agile organisations, organisations must be able to make good and fast decisions while deploying complex strategies, leaders need to focus on five counter-intuitive ideas. Amy Kates is an organisation designer and managing partner at Kates Kesler Organization Consulting, based in New York City. She advises business leaders around the world and teaches programmes at the Executive School of Business, Denmark and Cornell University Executive Education.
- Tags
- Culture
- Organisation Development & Change
October 11th 2019
The Agile Dashboard: Speed, Interaction and Pivot
Measuring Organisational Agility: Speed, Interaction Time and Pivot Agility is about time. Time is the definitive shift in recent decades. We are now experiencing exponential rather than linear rates of change, and we are mostly ill-prepared because there is so much uncertainty. Joe explained that increased uncertainty is creating decision chaos – the world has moved from complicated (problems were ultimately solvable – a strategy could be plotted, like chess) to complex (like poker, we now have to make a decision before we see the next card), and many organisations and their leaders are paralysed by this uncertainty and the risk it entails. Paralysis leads to waiting to move, but this is the worst thing an organisation can do in a complex world. Instead, organisations need to get information, decide fast and execute.
- Tags
- Organisation Development & Change
October 11th 2019
Creating the Right Culture
Once we figure out what kind of organisation we want to create, we then face the huge challenge of making it actually work. That means changing how people think and how they behave. It means, in other words, changing the culture (that is, what people say and do when they think you are not looking). John argued that it is not culture change per se that is hard. Organisational cultures are always evolving. The challenge is changing them in the direction you intend. As a leader, you are a role-model, whether you want to be or not. You influence the culture in your part of the organisation through the day-to-day things you say and the decisions you make. If you are like most leaders, usually you make it worse, not better. Many leaders undermine their lofty messages of change by failing to break old habits of how they talk and how they act, what they pay attention to and who they reward.
View PresentationOctober 11th 2019
Winning the 20's: The Organization of the Future
It’s a bad time to be average or ordinary as a company, with less growth, lower returns, and diminished organisational longevity increasingly common. We are seeing a polarisation of performance, and the profitability gap between winners and losers is widening. Technology is driving change at multiple levels, bringing us new processes and efficiency standards, new offerings and business models, new ways of organising within and across companies, and new ways of leading and managing. Given this context, there is no time for complacency. So, as the next decade approaches, business leaders must look beyond near-term pressures and understand at a more fundamental level what will separate the winners from the losers in the 2020s. To prepare for new competitive imperatives, leaders will need to go beyond simply adopting artificial intelligence (AI) or other technologies—instead, as Martin discussed in his session, they must fundamentally reinvent the enterprise through the lens of technology. Martin discussed several imperatives for designing the organisations of the future.
View PresentationOctober 11th 2019
OrgVue by Concentra - Design for Disruption
OrgVue’s masterclass highlighted the different types of disruption facing industries, businesses and departments as part of all our daily lives. Situations change. Goals move. Companies evolve. And industries are facing very different pressures.
- Tags
- Organisation Development & Change
October 11th 2019
Lane4 - Disruptive thinking for a disruptive world
Disruption isn’t just tomorrow’s challenge. We need to be able to think disruptively and respond to a rapidly changing business environment, today. Lane4’s latest research shows that the context of business has shifted significantly and what worked in the past for leaders and organisations no longer does. In order to successfully navigate their businesses through an uncertain future, senior leaders need to think and act differently.
- Tags
- Organisation Development & Change
October 11th 2019
Mercer - Agility in Action
At Mercer’s masterclass, delegates learned about how organisations have increased their agility to improve speed, nimbleness and adaptability in order to create a competitive advantage. Delegates were encouraged to answer questions such as how agile is your organisation? How agile do you need to be? And, how can you increase your own personal agility?
- Tags
- Organisation Development & Change
October 11th 2019
Mercer - Agility in Action
At Mercer’s masterclass, delegates learned about how organisations have increased their agility to improve speed, nimbleness and adaptability in order to create a competitive advantage. Delegates were encouraged to answer questions such as how agile is your organisation? How agile do you need to be? And, how can you increase your own personal agility?
- Tags
- Organisation Development & Change
