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Question for Jörgen:
There is an idea that we can learn from every single person on the planet. But there are also deeply ingrained habits we have been trained in that “teachers” have a formal designation which might limit our scope for learning. With that thought, does someone come to mind in the past five weeks that you wouldn’t consider a “formal” teacher at all but who you learned something special from… (perhaps even someone you aren’t even fond of) ?
Read MoreI'm writing this from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where the schools have been closed for at least three weeks and almost everyone is working from home. Only the most vital functions in society are still fully operational: people in healthcare, educators, law enforcement, fire brigades, government, etc. I'm sure most of you across the globe are experiencing something similar or will soon. We can still go outside on the streets here and when you do, you see a new kind of society. I see parents with their kids playing, educating, and shopping. The rat race has come to a full stop. Everyone nods at each other in mutual understanding. I wondered: can you imagine when society stays like this, what it would feel like? Of course, we have to beat that virus (it's horrible, no question about that), but can you imagine a society in which the truly important functions are really valued for what they do? Can you imagine a society in which the rest of us are just taking a step back and have come to terms with 'less'?
Read MoreThis summer I went on a family holiday to Croatia. It's a beautiful country with great nature and we planned for a whole lot of activities to do outdoor. One of those activities was rock climbing and it had a great lesson about change in it.
My son Merlijn is 14 years old and back home you can find him twice a week in an indoor climbing venue where he gets trained on different ascends with varying degrees of difficulty. He's been doing it for almost two years now and it was one of the reasons why we wanted to go climbing in Croatia so that he could have the experience of climbing in nature as well. I don't climb at all, but during our summer holiday I made an effort to follow in my sons footsteps (as did my 6 year old daughter and my wife). We went out with a guide and climbed a few routes that we're all easy to do. But then at the end of our time she took us to one that would challenge Merlijn, as she could see it was all too easy for him (for those of you who do climb rocks this was a route with difficulty 5b).
The past six months or so, I’ve been working with a client on the preparation for an immersive session with their global leadership team. They would like to change some behaviors of their team to become more adaptive to change. In their traditionally risk-averse environment, one of the key things they want to work on is dealing with failure. Up until now, failure is not an option in this organization. There is a fear of failure that is almost coded in their DNA. So the question arises: how do you change this attitude and create a culture that accepts failure as an opportunity to grow?
Read MoreThe past six months or so, I’ve been working with a client on the preparation for an immersive session with their global leadership team. They would like to change some behaviors of their team to become more adaptive to change. In their traditionally risk-averse environment, one of the key things they want to work on is dealing with failure. Up until now, failure is not an option in this organization. There is a fear of failure that is almost coded in their DNA. So the question arises: how do you change this attitude and create a culture that accepts failure as an opportunity to grow?
Read MoreA famous quote from Confucius reads: “the man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.” I’ve always liked that quote, but I think there’s even more to a question than just getting smarter.
Read MoreThe other week I was asked to talk about collaboration at a company with a group of architects. They were trying to cross the boundaries of their silo’ed departments more often in an attempt to become more innovative. They’d tried many things but none of them really stuck.
Read MoreWhen I was in junior high one of my teachers taught me to ‘never say what you don’t want to do’, because subconsciously you can not deal with that. Apparently it will plant a seed in your head leading you to do exactly what you didn’t want to do. In Dutch (and I don’t know if it translates well into English) we use the metaphor of ‘pink elephants’ to illustrate this. When you say to someone: don’t think of a pink elephant, a pink elephant will immediately jump into your mind.
Read MoreAs a member of the Community For Change it has become a regular practice for me to reflect on my own experiences in the realm of change, to better understand what I’m doing and learn from it. So, a couple of weeks ago when I was witnessing a meeting of a company with their top managers, the COO opened his talk with the question: “who of you knows what our mission statement is?” Nobody was able to reproduce the words the organization had so delicately formulated. The atmosphere in the room changed immediately: everyone felt they had failed and that they were doing a terrible job in making the company even more successful.
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