Novices emulate favorite bosses and colleagues in an effort to look and talk as if they know what they are doing — even when they have no clue. It’s how they develop and grow (just as children do, first imitating their parents, then their peers). But this natural — and efficient — learning process tends to break down as people gain experience and stature. As we become more certain about what we “know” and who we are, the idea of mimicking others feels artificial, even distasteful. So we stick with what’s natural and comfortable. And that’s precisely what gets us in trouble as we hit career transitions that call for new and different ways of leading.
This article examines how you can use the MoSCoW method to prioritize project tasks more efficiently, and ensure that everyone expects the same things. The MoSCoW method is a simple project-management approach that helps you, your team, and your stakeholders agree which tasks are critical to a project’s success. It also highlights those tasks that can be abandoned if deadlines or resources are threatened.
Companies are now starting to realize that top-down learning is not always appropriate, particularly where social media and use of technology are involved, and “reverse mentoring” programs are emerging as a result. These give junior team members the opportunity to share up-to-date skills and knowledge with more senior colleagues. This article discusses how you can use it to build your skills and bridge generational gaps.
Innovation drives economic growth. This logic has risen to dominate the discourse in development circles, with government leaders, policy influencers, and development-minded business leaders fully embracing innovation as a panacea for unemployment and economic underperformance. Looking back on 2014, it is not difficult to see this globalization of the innovation mindset at work.
To improve health, we need a joined-up approach to reduce poverty. One important factor driving high demand for health services has hardly been mentioned: poverty. The Marmot Review in 2010 found that people living in the poorest areas of England die seven years earlier than people living in the richest areas. The difference in the average ‘disability-free life expectancy’ is 17 years. People living in poverty die sooner than richer people, and spend more time living with a disability. Last year, JRF’s ‘state of the nation’ poverty report also found that people on low incomes are the most dissatisfied with the NHS. Overall satisfaction with the NHS has increased over the last 15 years. In 1998, 36.5% of people were dissatisfied with the NHS.
Up to now, diversity initiatives have focused primarily on fairness for legally protected populations. But organizations now have an opportunity to harness a more powerful and nuanced kind of diversity: diversity of thought. Advances in neurological research that are untangling how each of us thinks and solves problems can help organizations, including governments, operationalize diversity of thought and eventually change how they define and harness human capital.
Diversity of thought can bring an organization the following benefits:
It helps guard against groupthink and expert overconfidence.
It helps increase the scale of new insights.
It helps organizations identify the right employees who can best tackle their most pressing problems.
If we want impact to become a central consideration of the collaborative economy, it’s important to understand what kind of impact we’re talking about and where it’s coming from. While organisations in the collaborative economy contend with different aims and contexts, comparing impact shouldn’t be impossible – so long as we share a common language and approach.
Despite the collaborative economy’s much vaunted potential for disruption, little is known about the effect it is actually having on economies, communities and the environment. We think there are two ways of distinguishing impact in the collaborative economy.
Improvement Triggers provides a collection of questions which can be used to help you look at your work a bit differently. These questions are designed to provoke you into new ways of thinking, and are structured in a way that lets you approach either your existing offering or a potential new solution you are developing from a number of directions. This is a great way to make your work stronger, working especially well in areas where lots of competing solutions are already available. The questions in this tool assume that anything new is a modification of something that already exists. This might not always be strictly true, but approaching your work from this perspective can very be useful when you’re trying to articulate how what you’re doing is different from anyone else (or how it builds on what’s gone before).
A small but intriguing new survey by a pair of British consultants confirms the importance of resilience to business success. Resilience was defined by most as the ability to recover from setbacks, adapt well to change, and keep going in the face of adversity. But when Sarah Bond and Gillian Shapiro asked 835 employees from public, private, and nonprofit firms in Britain what was happening in their own lives that required them to draw on those reserves, they didn’t point to tragedies like the London Tube bombings, appalling business mistakes, the need to keep up with the inexorably accelerating pace of change, or the challenges of the still-difficult economy — they pointed to their co-workers.