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Thrive: Effective Adaptation for businesses
In the face of the current economic crisis, businesses have a strategic choice to make: to merely focus on surviving, or to make an intentional effort to adapt and open up the possibility of thriving, adapt effectively to the economic meltdown and thrive in these new conditions. So, the prerogative of today’s leaders and managers is to make sure their organizations:
Thrive!
Thrive is a complexity-based methodology that, with the use of metaphors, will give leaders a strategic framework for effective adaptation. These metaphors speak of a new management framework – a framework that leaves some of our tried and tested management strategies behind and replaces them with radical approaches for adaptation.
In the February HBR Gary Hamel noted how management that arrives at “one best strategy” through top down, analytical methods must give way to models based on the biological principles of:
- variety (generate lots of options),
- selection (use low-cost experiments to rapidly test critical assumptions), and
- retention (pour resources into the strategies that are gaining the most traction in the marketplace).
Hamel believes that leaders won’t make strategy but will work to create the conditions in which new strategies can emerge and evolve. The key messages of Effective Adaptation are:
- Shift our leadership paradigm from being builders of planned structures to gardeners, continuously adapting to the context in creating ecologies of management
- Shift our organizations from being spiders to starfish through adopting distributed cognition
- Leave behind our people management techniques rooted in the “breaking the horse” tradition, and embrace the ways of “horse whispering”. Managers need to become people-whispers
- Face up to our addiction to prescription as managers and break the habit of applying best practice in all areas – moving from cooks to chefs
- Move from relying on failsafe solutions to adopting safe-fail prototyping.
The foundational concepts behind Thrive:
- Complexity theory and application
- Naturalistic managing through creating ecologies
- Prototyping
- Distributed cognition
- Context and the use of Narrative
Thrive: Effective Adaptation is offered as:
- a keynote presentation & workshop
- an experience-based educational programme for leadership teams
- a consulting process that assists organizations in applying the Thrive principles
