Articles

Learning to See, Not Just Look: Wack and Scenario Thinking

Tags: scenario planning, Pierre Wack, futures thinking, complex systems, strategic foresight, uncertainty, decision-making, Gurdjieff, oil crisis, systems thinking

How Pierre Wack foresaw the oil crisis at Shell. On the limits of forecasting, complex systems, and preparing for the future through "rehearsal of the mind."

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How Do Ships Navigate: By Command? Or on Their Own?

Tags: distributed cognition, complex adaptive systems, leadership, sensemaking, command and control, systems thinking, organizational learning, Edwin Hutchins, cognition in the wild, complexity, emergence, decision making, adaptive leadership, navigation metaphor, ethnography, collective intelligence

How do ships really know where they are? Drawing on Edwin Hutchins’ ethnographic research, this essay explores distributed cognition, complex adaptive systems, and why effective leadership is about sustaining collective sense-making rather than command and control.

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The Misunderstood Legacy of Kaizen: From Complexity to Control

Tags: Kaizen, Deming, Safe-to-Fail, Complexity Thinking, Systems Thinking, Adaptive Leadership, Organizational Learning, Lean vs Complexity, Continuous Improvement, Philosophy of Management

Kaizen was once a philosophy of collective learning within uncertainty. Over time it became a system of control. This essay explores how that transformation happened and what reclaiming Kaizen’s original spirit could mean for leadership and complexity today.

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