Tracking The Trigger Point, Then Releasing It

Posted 3 years ago Tagged

Trigger points are small knots in muscles, which cause pain where it originates and/or in a spot that may seem completely unconnected.

Trigger points can decrease the range of motion and can cause muscles to fatigue quicker than they normally would.

For example, you may experience a sharp pain in your elbow, but that pain is caused by a trigger point in your shoulder blade. Such pain is known as referred pain and comes from the nerves impacted by the underlying cause of your symptoms. You seek relief for the obvious elbow pain, but the cause of that pain lies with a weakness in your shoulder blade.

The origin of the pain is not immediately obvious, while it manifests in one place, the cause lies elsewhere that is not so obvious. If you are working on transformation programmes with organisations, it is essential to identify “innovation trigger points”.

ICeberg

Avoiding Potential Icebergs or Action After Impact?

Posted 3 years ago Tagged

The question remains, “is the more impressive leader the person who pre-empts a possible iceberg coming and avoids potential impact or the leader who takes action after impact when the damage is done? I think Dee Hock, (who wrote a magnificent foreword for my book “Undisruptable”), understood the subtleties of such a question challenge when he said, 

Devil Gets You at the Top

The Hot Hand Fallacy: The Devil Gets You at the Top

Posted 3 years ago Tagged

Like so many organisations, The Titanic was perceived as “too big to fail” so there was less vigilance necessary and little or no preparation for a possible disruption was required. Those involved read their own press, they drank their own koolade and paid the ultimate price. In organisations, lives are not lost, but lives are impacted heavily. A few years ago (pre-pandemic), I visited the Titanic Museum in Belfast. What struck me was the recordings of those workers who worked so hard to build the ship. They were proud, they felt they were part of something bigger than the tasks over which they agonised. When The Titanic sank, you could hear their genuine sadness, not just for the loss of lives, but because they felt part of that failure. Just as Nokia clung to their titanic product and its associated business model or Blockbuster clung to bricks over clicks (ousting John Antioco, who saw clicks as the future) or General Motors and Ford dismissed Toyota in the 1950s, Titanic failed because of the hot hand fallacy, coupled with hubris.

The Sandman from the spider-man Movie

In Times of Great Change, Grip Loosely

Posted 4 years ago Tagged

This Thursday Thought holds lessons for us in a business and personal context. To navigate change, we must grip our transient advantages loosely. Today, as we close out the Covid-19 pandemic under the threat of war, uncertainty is a certain ingredient of our life experience. We must be make peace with uncertainty and let go of control. The only control we can exercise is over our preparation, in doing so we prepare our response to unavoidable disorder and chaos.

Deciduous Tree

The Rise (and Fall) of The Deciduous Organisation

Posted 4 years ago Tagged

Financial measurement alone can suggest an organization is well, while the underlying culture is often sick (as well as many of those people working there). When it comes to deciduous organizations, they pay no attention to the devastating impact on families, the psychological impact on individuals and society when they chose profits over people. One caveat is that not all companies have behaved in this way, some organizations – big and small – displayed heroic acts of loyalty to their people during seasonal stress, but they are in the minority. Is it any wonder that employees are less loyal today than they have been decades ago?

Corporate Innovation – First Vertical, Then Horizontal, Then Multi-Directional

Posted 4 years ago Tagged

The main point of this Thursday Thought is that many people in a similar position to me, believe(d) that, “It is better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission.” We also subscribe to what Picasso said, “The first act of creation is one of destruction.” However, I understand now that this approach is useful in certain situations, but when it comes to legacy organization transformation efforts, it will fail. Unless you are going to gut the organization like a Black Dinner or Red Wedding, you will not change mindsets in a positive sense and you will turn most of the organisation against you, even if they know you mean well. If you consider yourself a pioneer, you will definitely take some arrows. 

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