It’s funny how things go in circles:
– my blog on ‘Elevator pitch‘ kickstarted a thread in TU812 course cafe forum about introducing new things into an organisation. Another student commented there about the cultural receptiveness to change.
– my blog on ‘Change‘ kickstarted a thread in Systems Place about innovation.
These two threads reminded me of something I covered in B822 Creativity, Innovation and Change. Continue reading
I am sure I am not the only ‘systems practitioner’-in-training who finds it difficult to introduce systems practice into their workplace. I think it is different if you are an ‘external’ consultant or facilitator because clients expect you to bring something that they don’t know yourself. But when you are an employee, colleagues (especially people who are more senior than yourself) don’t really expect you to innovate on how to do or think about things, just what you do.
So I try to do it by subterfuge. A little bit here, a little bit there. But the other day, I missed an opportunity because I was not prepared. Continue reading
(TU812 SAQ 1.1)
Practice is a performance, each performance relies on a combination of four elements unique to the context:
Firstly, there is the practitioner – the individual with their mix of knowledge, experience and skills.
Secondly, the situation that the practitioner is working in.
Thirdly, the framework of ideas or theories held by the practitioner
and
Fourthly, the method used by the practitioner as they go about doing what they do.
(Activity 1.6;Activity 1.7; Activity 1.11)
In activity 1.7 we were asked to play on the idea that TU812 is an “inquiry into my systems practice for managing systemic change”
let’s break this down a little: Continue reading
I use the word “change” a lot but never really stopped to think about my understanding of the concept. Just had a few minutes fun looking up “change” on http://www.visualthesaurus.com/ (the trial version). It has loads of connections so it is obviously quite a rich word.
So what are the foundations of my understanding of “change” and how has that changed (!) as I have got more into systems practice. Continue reading
I have been reading and finding out about systems stuff for ages. Going way back – maybe I’ll cover that one day. Now I am part way through a postgraduate diploma in Systems Practice with the Open University. This blog is adapted from a post I did to the student forum early in the first module….
In the beginning, we did lots of reading (interspersed with the odd ‘practice’ activity that you can get away with doing half-heartedly). The reading was interesting and I learned a lot about what systems thinking is; how it applies to strategy making; the lives and works of key historic thinkers; the importance of tools and so on.
Then the first assignment came along and told us to do systems thinking for real – or at least practice it. Continue reading