Decisions: Four Key Roles Make for Quality Decision-Making

Various organizational maladies can be traced to a lack of clarity around decision roles. After-the-fact objections, confusion in implementation, micromanagement, scapegoating, and whipsawing all imply a need to define roles with greater clarity.

Quicken the Pace of Planning at Schools and Colleges

A Unified Planning Framework for Culture, Strategy, and Brand At many non-profit institutions, particularly educational institutions, strategic plans show a preference for addition over consolidation—for expansion over alignment. This programmatic and operational accretion drives steady increases in budgets and staffing, and concomitant growth in goals for endowments and annual philanthropic support. Higher Cost, Slower Pace = […]

Five Books for Developing Systems Thinking

See horizontal connections across operations, and learn how human factors contribute to success or failure. Systems Thinking is critical for effective strategy, communications, and creative planning. But what makes a good systems thinker? Most talented systems thinkers I know are generalists — and I have long remarked that folks who spend meaningful time in personal hobbies seem to […]

Three Design Rules (and One Paradox)

Laziness, Novelty, and Fear of Loss are Powerful Motivators for Humans. As a designer, I can rely on a single assumption to guide most of my work: humans are lazy. (This is ‘trumpian shorthand’ for “people tend to maximize benefit and minimize effort around self-interest.) Whether I am enticing them with advertising, seeking to change their […]