There are clear fashions in consultancy as in so much else – one of the industry’s selling points is that firms can identify something called best practice in one organisation and apply it to others. But that assumes, of course, both that the first organisation’s success is actually a function of the behaviour identified as [...]
As we move into post-budget strategising, with the ambition of translating not-yet-developed strategies into hardly-yet-dreamt-of plans, it is worth reminding ourselves that planning (and, for that matter, strategising) doesn’t actually achieve anything. We can describe, and plan for, the glorious world of March 2011, and the still more splendid world of 2015 and beyond – [...]
We operate in an organisation with tremendous inertia. Changing the whole thing feels impossible; changing small parts of it can feel irrelevant. There are two temptations which come from that. The first is to look for quick wins. They can have their place, particularly if they are small parts of a longer whole (even if [...]
Having spent a long time in total denial at the prospect of speaking at the eGov Summit (!), not least because I think they missed out the stage where I actually accepted their invitation to speak, I needed a presentation in a hurry. The obvious answer was to use a pantomime horse approach – the [...]
A wet afternoon at Lords yesterday, so the conversation naturally turned to e-government. I was only there for two sessions, one of which was my own, so didn’t get a great feel for the event as a whole, but I did get to see Michael Stephenson – the Technology Director (and CIO) for DfES. His [...]
Scenario planners, concerned in part that people may imagine the future too narrowly, encourage the creation of alternative possible future scenarios as a tool. Philip Tetlock, who has written a book about experts’ ability to forecast, did an experiment: Before the exercise, people’s probabilities at least added to about 100%. The exercise led participants to [...]
Guy Kawasaki also says: The root cause of mission statement-itis is that most organizations are run by people who have either gotten an MBA or worked for McKinsey—or both. He is more positive about ‘mantras’: ‘a mantra is three or four words long. Tops. Its purpose is to help employees truly understand why the organization [...]
David Osborne wrote Reinventing Government over ten years ago, and has suffered the fate of many of his ideas becoming received wisdom, without any particular recognition that he had them (or at least gathered and published them) first. His current big theme is The Price of Government, the core idea of which is that government [...]
This site claims to be the defintive collection of idea generation methods. From brainstorming to other peoples’ shoes. From poetry writing to timeline walking. And if you haven’t done guided fantasy yet, you can hardly have lived.