Social Complexity and Agility
October 27th, 2009

On retrospective coherence – Part 1

I met up with my friend Michael last night. Michael’s a great guy, an expert in many fields, but one thing he really does well is throw a party. I have many happy (and sometimes drunken) memories of bashes held at his place.
One of the reasons I met up with him was because I’m planning [...]

July 14th, 2009

Turning up the heat – the levels

(n.b. This section is still a work in progress. I’ve been finding it easier to explain the different levels by giving examples, i.e. symptoms, than by giving a long description).
Level 5: Burning
(results in team burnout and death marching)
At the burning level, the heat is too high. The stress level results in chaos, aggression, and a [...]

June 15th, 2009

Turning up the heat – the basic model

In my first book excerpt, I described the idea behind the heat model. Here’s the model itself.
In the “turning up the heat” model, we differentiate between 5 different levels of heat: burning, cooking, cooling, congealing, and solidifying. It takes effort and energy to maintain any level of heat. The dissipation of heat in teams can [...]

May 5th, 2009

Turning up the heat – introduction

This is the first slice from the book chapter on the “Turning up the heat” model.
Vegetable soup
My grandfather was a fantastic chef, and he was a great inspiration to me. My parents named me after him, and not only did I inherit his love of, and talent for, cooking, but unfortunately also his girth. One [...]

May 5th, 2009

Book status

So, my book is finally starting to take shape. As we clean up and copy edit it, I’ll be posting bits and pieces here. Feel free to drop by here now and again to see if anything new has been posted – or subscribe to the RSS feed.
Another reason for posting book excerpts is to [...]