informal coalitions

The roles of conversation and vision in team and organizational leadership

Nick Smith, in How to Set a Team on Fire, sets out some wide-ranging challenges to management orthodoxy in relation to various aspects of team and organizational performance, which are well worth reading. Two brief extracts give a flavour of this thoughts on the nature and roles of vision and conversation:

• On vision

"… I'd argue that shared visions are not all they're cracked up to be. If you think about it, the more diverse a team of people are, the less chance there is of arriving at a common vision. Diversity and a unified perspective are, to great extent, mutually exclusive. In anything but a small group, finding common purpose is nigh impossible unless you're going to select a team of me-too automatons."

Working the shadow side of organizations - implications for facilitation

Johnnie Moore, in a typically thoughtful post entitled "A rambling post about the shadow side", highlights the challenges for facilitators in dealing with shadow-side issues that emerge - by accident or design - during organizational workshops and other meetings. His feelings are echoed by others' comments on the post. And I added my own 'two pennyworth' on this critically important aspect of organizational dynamics - and its implications for facilitation.

For the record, my  comments and Johnnie's response are reproduced below.

Complexity and organizational dynamics - Does it make sense to differentiate between 'levels' of complexity?

In his Change Management Blog,  Holger Nauheimer outlines a number of models that seek to categorize organizational dynamics in terms of different 'levels' or 'types' of complexity. 

He cites the work of Dave Snowden, (early) Ralph Stacey and Otto Scharmer.  His post was triggered by the publishing of Scharmer’s latest book, Theory U.  A comment by Martin Koser questions the idea that different levels of complexity can be differentiated in the ways described. My response from an informal coalitions perspective is set out below.