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Great Leaders Manage Complexity with Self-Awareness and Context Awareness
People's perception and expectations on leadership requires a leader to understand their own contextual significance which makes it difficult to become an appreciated leader. Also trivialisation many times unknowingly stands in the way of progress in complex situations. This article explores specific traits that distinguish people who repeatedly provide appreciated and appropriate leadership.
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Ethical Decisions in a Wicked World: the Role of Technologists, Entrepreneurs, and Organizations
Wherever role you are playing - consumer, employee, entrepreneur, manager - the purpose of a business is to serve society. Organizations need to seek win-win solutions, consider sustainability and ethics in all phases, and learn how to scan and deal with unintended consequences of each intervention. This article brings concepts and ideas to spark initial action for wicked problems using ethics.
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Practical Applications of Complexity Theory in Software and Digital Products Development
What if we start a new conversation about complexity, also engaging a completely different crowd - the hands-on practitioners, the problem solvers, the tinkerers? What if we approach that conversation in another way? This article is guided by two new radical ideas; the first idea is on the theory and practice of complexity, and the second idea is on the human element in complexity theory.
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Cynefin Applied: Adapting to Changing Contexts
The book Cynefin: Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of our World by Dave Snowden describes the Cynefin framework and explores how it has developed over the years. It also provides stories where people who have applied Cynefin share their experiences.
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Q&A on The Book AO, Concepts and Patterns of 21-st Century Agile Organizations
The book AO, concepts and patterns of 21-st century agile organizations by Pierre Neis explores the concept of designing systems to allow for agile behaviour. It provides patterns to establish agile organizations that are able to respond to 21-st century challenges.
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The New Killer Apps: Teamwork and Weak Signal Detection Lessons from the Military
There are a lot of great teamwork and weak signal detection lessons from the military that can help forward-leaning leaders create the organizational agility and safety they need to survive and thrive on their own terms in this VUCA world. This article explores how teamwork and weak signal detection lessons from the military are becoming “The New Killer Apps.”
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Adaptable or Predictable? Strive for Both – Be Predictably Adaptable!
Our efforts to improve software development face the question of what to focus on. Should we govern for predictability without concern of value, maximizing cost-efficiency without concern for end-to-end responsiveness? Or maybe do the opposite and govern for value over predictability, focus on responsiveness over cost efficiency? What we really need is to be predictably adaptable.
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Q&A with Dave Snowden on Leadership and Using Cynefin for Capturing Requirements
Dave Snowden gave a talk titled "Context is Everything" at the Scaling Agile for the Enterprise 2016 congress in Brussels, Belgium. InfoQ interviewed him about applying leadership models, the Cynefin model and how it can be used for capturing requirements, scaling agile, and sustainable change.
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Cynefin 101 – Shared Context and Sense Making
The Cynefin model can be used in different ways; for categorisation which is useful from a situational perspective; for contextualisation which is useful in taking a rain check point and deciding what you want to do and also from a dynamics perspective. This article examines the situation where there is a need to make sense of situation as we have found that there are a large number of issues.
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Cynefin 101 – Portfolio Management
One of the core ideas of Cynefin is the use of safe-to-fail experiments to determine how you want to evolve the system. As Seneca the Younger said “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable”. This paper looks are the Cynefin practices related these experiments and the rigorous review of them.
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Cynefin 101 – An Introduction
This paper is to introduces the Cynefin model and its practices which can be used to address the uncertainty of the modern world. The practices that are introduced can be used to compliment traditional approaches to project, programme and portfolio management. This provides a more comprehensive approach that reflects the needs of management in an ever more uncertain world.