Sublime

making incremental improvements to what no longer works well.

CORE LOOPS OF KEY…

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choose a problem which has been tackled before, with little or no success. This ensures that a systemic dynamic is at play.

But as you move toward the more intangible elements, such as people’s deep-seated attitudes and beliefs, your leverage for effective change increases. You come closer to looking at the underlying reasons why the rules, physical structure, and work processes take their current form.

Left-Hand Column.

See Charlie Kiefer’s cameo “Executive Team Leadership,” (page 435).

organizational management has been developing methods for increasing productivity and minimizing risk and errors that tend to stifle creative experimentation.

As W. Edwards Deming is also credited with observing, every process is perfectly designed to deliver the results it gets. If we believe that innovation is messy and imperfect and unknowable, we build processes that operationalize those beliefs. And that’s what many companies have done: unwittingly designed innovation processes that perfectly churn

Moreover, since structure in human systems includes the “operating policies” of the decision makers in the system, redesigning our own decision making redesigns the system structure.