Today, the debate about working arrangements is still alive and well. Organisations continue to grapple with finding the right approach. Some have mandated a return to the office, others have gone fully remote, and many are experimenting with hybrid models. So, what’s the right approach?

One of the most common complaints I hear from teams, especially in large organisations, is that they are being “reactive” to their work. They often use the word "overwhelmed" to describe how they feel.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been writing about what helps teams and organisations create a Culture of Learning versus a Culture of (just) Performance or (just) Comfort — this week I will write about Shared Accountability and Commitment.

For decades, organisations and teams have tried to fix their problems by creating and running big projects with the hope that they will fix whatever is not working at the time: customer satisfaction, employee engagement, sales or whatever process is not working.

Last week I shared with my team in one of our weekly meetings that I had written 27 weekly articles since I started this experiment 6 months ago. One article, every week that is sent on Thursday at 9am, and I still haven’t missed one. I even joked saying: “who thought I wasn’t going to be that consistent?”.

Last week I spoke about Lean and how I believe, similarly to agile, that above all else, it is a business philosophy; or a way to think about business and organisations. Today I am going to give you three tools that were created under the lean banner that anyone can use with their teams and/or organisations today.

Lean is another of those words, like agile, that has been thrown into the corporate world a lot over the last few years / decades. But like agile; I believe it has been used in the wrong way or context.

Sadly, agile is not a word that is totally well received in organisations these days; especially by people that have “suffered” big agile transformations thrown upon them. Some people are sceptical when they hear the word and in general, it has probably been overused and misused a lot in the last 5 to 10 years in the world of business.

Last week I wrote about how agile started; today I am going to talk about what has happened since then, and how it has evolved to this day.

I have been wanting to write about agility for a while now; and given that this is a topic that is very close to my heart, it may turn into a three- or four-week series.

If you look at an org chart from 1886, you may be surprised that it looks exactly the same as many org charts in 2024. There is a big box at the top and then lines that cascade to a few smaller boxes underneath and those have more smaller boxes underneath and so on.

The way I think about busyness is at two levels: organisational level and personal / human level. Let’s explore first the organisational one, and next week we will explore the personal human one. What are the things that contribute to that busyness trap in organisations at a systematic level?

I see many organisations wasting a lot of time and effort trying to predict the future. It seems like predicting the future give those organisations some sort of (false) sense of comfort. 

I think it was the American psychiatrist George Vaillant who said: “there are two pillars of happiness in life. One is love; the other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.”