informal coalitions

Little Britain and the paradox of team working

If today's Mail on Sunday is to be believed, tensions have surfaced in the relationship between the two co-creators and presenters of award-winning BBC comedy Little Britain. Allegedly, Matt Lucas and David Walliams have disagreed on the future direction that the show should take and on how their partnership should develop. These disagreements have, the paper claims, extended to the question of who should be credited with the show's success.

Whether or not there is any truth in the specifics of this story is not the issue here. What this story highlights, though, is the paradoxical nature of all team-based relationships, which most conventional discussions of the subject ignore.

Target setting

Is it WISE to be SMART?

For many years, managers have been urged to set "SMART" targets for their staff, where the SMART acronym stands for some variant of Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based. This seems like common sense advice; and yet most organizations still find it difficult to make this common sense work! The dynamics of informal coalitions suggests that managers need to ask themselves if the use of SMART targets to manage performance is wise, in a complex, uncertain and rapidly changing world.

Management models and frameworks - facilitating sensemaking conversations

The Challenge

"Since we agree that change occurs through everyday conversations and interactions, why do you feel it is necessary to include references to grids, frameworks and toolkits in Informal Coalitions?"  This reasonable challenge was put to me recently, when I was discussing the contents of the book with a leading UK academic who lectures and consults in organizational change from a complexity perspective (see Chapter Summaries, for example).