The Blog

Less than one percent of megaprojects deliver the promised benefits on time and on budget. We explain why they go wrong, how you can fix them and why the fix works. We also show how these lessons can be applied to all capital projects of scale.

From Mobilize: Dancing In The World... page 75: Everyone acts in ways that can be understood as designing. Many of those that I understand as designers – perhaps most – do not understand themselves as designers. Rather they think of themselves as innovators, entrepreneurs, or simply people who had the fortune to do some things that changed their profession, their company, or their industry.

Finally, after several years of collecting, archiving, compiling, editing, and reviewing Chauncey Bell's lifetime of work, the wait is over. I am thrilled to announce the imminent release of Chauncey's book Mobilize: Dancing in the World.

[Video] Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores explore the untold story of Google and shed light on the background and context of conditions that led to a development of massive enterprise. 

0-4 minutes in Spanish. 4 min and onward in English. 

We live in a world full of intelligent, caring, inventive people. Nevertheless, people find it difficult to break old habits, resolve old wounds, make changes, and bring the kinds of conversations and inventions, new ways of being together and doing things together, of which all of us dream some of the time, and some of us dream for most of our lives.

While in the role of the President of National Council on Innovation for Competitiveness, Dr. Fernando Flores delivered a major report that is a must read for anyone serious about navigating the big shifts and openings in business world, and understanding innovation. In a blog posting reprinted in The Wall Street Journal CIO…

When I say I trust you, I’m saying I have the assessment that you are going to be able to fulfill promises reliably in a particular domain (not any/all areas) 1) Competence: I trust your competence – your capacity to fulfill these promises because you know something about what is needed to get things done to fulfill the promises…

Moods and Disclosive Spaces, or Clearings, are ways that we attempt to articulate something important about the totality of a situation, a person, an enterprise, a community, a nation. Not about the totality of descriptive possibilities, but about the whole, the unity, the organizing concern and commitment, etc. They are different from each other, but the disclosive space of, for example, accounting, has characteristic moods.

When we enter into a conversation about some action where we are concerned to act wisely, usually our attention is on intervening in some set of current behaviors, to bring about possible futures that will not otherwise happen, and to lead people away from other futures that would be better avoided.

I am a designer of business habits. I design ways that human beings – in explicit or tacit collaboration with others – do things to shape their futures by adjusting or changing their habits. Mostly I work in large institutions. In the process of building new working habits in a number of industries over the years, I have designed and led the development of several complex software systems.

When a leadership team commits seriously to prepare an organization for a new future, one or more people must richly embody the elements of what we call the positioning struggle – the twin concerns of identity and viability[i]. These leaders take responsibility for the articulation of the scenarios, declaration of priorities, and definition of strategic tasks.

The company needs continuous incremental improvements to keep the core business competitive, and discontinuous breakthroughs to shift direction and take or maintain leadership in the industry.[i] To innovate reliably, a crucial investment is learning well how your people listen to others.

Every work activity, everything that you and I see, everything we do not see, and how we understand our worlds, are determined by invisible structures of practices, technologies and interpretations. We give the name operating system to these structures. They shape our understanding of the world, our actions, and our customers’ experience. 

In this background, over the course of more than 40 years of designing operating models and reshaping the habits of people working in organizations around the world, I have noted the following nine principles for understanding how we human beings may navigate responsibly and effectively in our communities.