Leadership Management-Business

Collaborative Intelligence: Using Teams to Solve Hard Problems

Big problems – the kind that societies face – often require an approach like Aesop’s fable. A bunch of blindfolded folks touch different parts of an elephant and describe them to each other. No one can make sense about what the reality is because they’re all describing different things like a tail, a trunk, a belly, or a foot. It’s only when they combine their descriptions into a consistent framework that they can gather that…

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Management-Business

Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

American business culture is built around heroes that “save the day.” Perhaps bigger heroes, however, are those unheralded ones who quietly prevent problems from happening in the first place. To do so does not just require seeing a problem and a solution; it requires identifying the root cause and a solution to that root cause. It demands going “upstream” to deal with the issues that cause downstream issues. Dan Heath contends that few organizations and…

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