Looking Fourth

  Beyond the Balance Sheet... on Actuality, Capability and Potentiality 20 years ago Stafford Beer defined the Viable Systems Model, or VSM. There are many more things for me to write on his body of work. I was first introduced to this whilst doing my MBA at Victoria University of Wellington by Professor John Brockelsby and also have the privilege of learning from other great thinkers and teachers like Professor Stephen Cummings , Professor Todd Bridgman and Professor Arun Elias (more on them in future posts and potentially on the Looking Fourth channel). I will also be posting a short summary of the book referenced here, The Brain of Firm, on the complementary blog & Reading Fourth . "Here we finally detect the manager who is doing most these days to wreck industrial enterprise." Stafford Beer, The Brain of the Firm, 1974 Watching the latest round of Microsoft layoffs off the back of earnings that significantly exceeded expectations, these words penned by Stafford Bee...

    & The Blog... A Picture Paints a 1,000 Words Why are visualisations such a powerful part of transformation and change management? in part it's because a single image can convey a lot of information in a much more compressed format than writing everything down. I think we can all agree on that. I also think that it's because many people have a better connection with something they can see than something they can read. In part it's because for many of us it's easier for us to create our own mental image and our part in it, as well as interpreting it in our own way. As a systems thinker I don't constrain myself to one or two methods. I range across the spectrum of systems methodologies as build a multi-method approach that makes sense for the transformation and where we are in the phase of that change activity. I'm a big fan of Peter Checkland's Soft Systems Methodology (or SSM). A very important part of this method is the Rich Picture. Over in the  The...