If planning alone won’t cut it, what else can we count on in these uncertain times? Mayvin Director Martin Saville sets out three key leadership principles for navigating change. Well, this has been a funny old year, hasn’t it? Predictably unpredictable. It’s anyone’s guess what will happen to the UK’s relationship with the EU, along …
Dr Rob Warwick, Reader in Management and Organisational Learning at the University of Chichester introduces his latest research project with Mayvin Director Dr James Traeger: Practice-based Learning. Ideas are bubbling up for a new research project. And one keeps coming back to me and it is this: what might Self-Managed Learning (SML) look like in the 21st …
Mayvin Director James Traeger sees feminist leadership as part of creating a more inclusive culture. But could staying silent be his wisest contribution to the conversation? We sat in a circle, myself and five women. The speaker at this conference had just described herself, amongst other things, as a feminist leader. We were tasked to …
Mayvin Director Martin Saville responds to a Guardian article about the need for new approaches to leadership in the NHS I read a great article last Monday in The Guardian’s ‘Views from the NHS frontline’ series. The writer, an anonymous executive coach to senior NHS execs, was arguing that most senior leaders in the NHS …
Do Senior Leaders shy away from uncovering the truth about the breakdowns in their businesses? Is this why we sometimes experience organisations as incapable of integrating the learning we provoke? At Mayvin we often grapple with the challenge of making sure that the learning we facilitate in our clients’ businesses is fully integrated. We ourselves …
I recently visited an emarketing company. About 20 mostly young people sat in four rows with keyboards and screens. I was there in response to an enquiry from the CEO concerning the development of his team – he had in mind that I might run a workshop for all employees on a topic of interest to …
This version of the Glass Wall was a track session at the 2013 OD Network Europe Conference. We were lucky enough to have a group of sophisticated, enthusiastic and open practitioners willing to ‘have a go’ and join the experiment; an ideal participant group! We set things up so that a group of five people in the …
Last year, I was part of The New Skills for Learning and Organisation Development Practitioners programme (facilitated by James Traeger from Mayvin). In addition to developing my existing skills, my original aspiration for being part of the group was to understand how I could be more effective at using social media for sharing information in …
Complexity is hard to explain. Well it would be wouldn’t it? Making such a set of ideas applicable in a practical way to the everyday life of an organisation is a challenge. It isn’t that complexity is strange to us – after all it is something we are dealing with all the time. If you’ve …
The friend opposite me was clearly relieved about the problem he had resolved with a colleague. ‘I let it go.’ He said. ‘I felt so much better, like a weight lifted from my shoulders. It was the opposite of what I expected.’ My son just came back from Israel. But let’s not start there… Recently …
How effective is leadership development? Some things to consider: Prior to the economic crash, many of the investment banks that indulged in dubious behaviours, were lauded for their leadership development programmes. Regularly we heard commentators in the media reference a lack of leadership, and with recent scandals in politics (such as the expenses scandal) or …
I have been wondering whether being economical with the truth comes at too high a price. It is expensive for people, feeling uncomfortable, shifting in their seats in meetings, looking studiously at papers, and screens, and waiting for a subject to move on. I have always thought of myself as someone who would – within …
Due to family events that rather caught me by surprise, I couldn’t attend the Glass Wall session at the ODN conference in person. But that turned out to be quite fortuitous. These same events meant I had to stay at home, but that also that I could ‘follow’ the gist of the conversation via twitterfall, …
It seems we were on to something in our last posting. We read in the latest New Scientist that highly credible, peer-reviewed research backs our hunch that companies inadvertently undermine their talent. According to research findings, more stumbled upon than planned, by André Spicer, from Cass Business School, London, working with Mats Alvesson from Lund …
There is a scene from David Bowie’s iconic 1970s movie, the ‘Man Who Fell to Earth’. At the end of the story, the Martian (played by Bowie) is being interviewed on TV. We are shocked to see how dull this one-time supernatural being has become. He has been quite literally brought down to Earth. It …
Speculation abounds as to whether the remains found buried under a Leicester City Car Park are those of the supposedly notorious English King, Richard III. Richard’s death in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field broadly coincided with the end of the internecine War of the Roses and ushered in an era of relative stability …
The TJ Winter Conference – Using Social Media in Learning #TJ12 ran last month in London and for me it seemed the ideal place to introduce the idea of the Glass Wall to a larger audience. We kicked off the experiment in the afternoon, straight after lunch and had changed the room layout slightly to …
Recently, I had the pleasure of seeing Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Royal Opera House. The Ring is a series of four operas lasting in total around 16 hours, dealing with many of humanity’s universal themes; and at least for those of us who are opera-heads, it is one of the greatest pieces of art …
Honestly! Chelsea under Di Matteo win the FA cup and the Champions League and now he gets the sack, not half a year later! But WAIT! Don’t stop reading! This isn’t, despite what you may think, really about football. It is about my recurring theme here. How can we, in this crazy world, lead well …
To the C21L group: well I’ve been hassling you all to come up with something that reflects on your experience and realised I haven’t offered much myself recently! So here goes… I am sitting in my kitchen diner, with the sun coming through the frosted glass. I have a warm feeling when I think of …
How can we encourage organisations to engage more wholeheartedly with Social Media, both inside and beyond their boundaries? How could we combine this inquiry with helping leaders obtain the capacities required in complex businesses? We embraced these linked questions in what became the ‘Glass Wall’ experiment, a joint venture between Training Journal and leadership and …
Back in February 2012, we asked a group of associates a question that had been troubling us since we formed Mayvin in 2011: How do we develop a programme of learning in C21L (21st Century leadership) context that is both sensitive to relationships and could work well online/in a virtual & socially networked environment? Luckily …
What is leadership for? Most of the time, I suggest, it is about dealing with people’s anxiety. And because of the uncertainty, complexity and pace that the 21st Century brings us, it could be that in C21L terms, this anxiety is getting bigger. In 1933, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt said ‘We have nothing to …
This is one of those posts that my PHD supervisor charmingly refers to as throat clearing – its the piece you have to write before you can write the piece you want to write. I have been doing a lot of internal mulling about the nature of collaboration and leadership in networked organisations. This is …
Social networking means that that our actions are going to more subject to scrutiny than ever before. Although we shouldn’t try to be a good person just because someone is watching, it makes the challenge and opportunity of goodness more acute and more present in the everyday moments of truth that we face. In the …
The Rabbi who gave the sermon was compelling. She was a bright, young woman – an engaging speaker.There was a great balance of wisdom, self-deprecation, and charm in her talk. But then she started to use a word that landed with a kind of thud. Like a stone on the windscreen, it shattered my picture …
How do you train 21st Century (C21L) leaders to face the truth, or more poignantly the truths in their organisation, the un-sanitized, varied, complex perspectives that abound across the layers of authority? Those in power at senior levels tend to be insulated from what is going on at street level. Creating a kind of short-circuit, …
We have been reading, writing and talking for a little over a year now about different elements of 21st Century Leadership (C21L). Over the last few weeks, my experience has been of a number of elements suddenly dropping into place. It’s as if the story has suddenly become clear. So here goes: 21st Century Leadership …
Over the last few years I have used my blog partly to hold myself to account. In the same way as I might broadcast the fact that I am going for a run in the morning (I’m not by the way – just to be clear) I would use the blog to confirm and communicate …
What makes a person? Is a person a singular thing? Think of your day – the one you are having right now. What roles are you playing? What states have you been through? (For ‘states’, read: moods, feelings, ups and downs, responses, reactions etc.). On that basis, how much of ‘one thing’ are you? Or …