Your deliverables were designed for your project’s clients—the people who asked for the results—along with the people you report to. There are also the ultimate beneficiaries of your work: customers, users, or other stakeholders that your client serves. You considered the value for them when assessing your project scorecard. But your project offers much more […]
No matter how forward-looking or agile companies aim to be, workplaces don’t look on failure kindly. Yet anyone who wants to innovate knows that there’s a risk that things won’t go as planned. Here’s the silver lining: when things go off track this can be a good thing, if you’re prepared to harness the benefits. […]
Embracing failure works only when you fail at the right time. Here’s how to ensure that happens. Think back to your last project. Was it set up to maximize learning? Did you uncover valuable insights along the way? Did you deliver what you set out to? And once it was over, did your team reflect, […]
In the aftermath of challenging projects, team members commonly wish they had invested more of their smarts at the outset. For example, one team we worked with realized that a better launch could have revealed an important lack of connection between project goals and the priorities of the rest of the organization early enough for […]
Systems that are dynamically complex are challenging to understand and manage because their behavior is shaped by hard-to-predict relationships that play out in different ways when conditions vary. When causes are separated from their effects in time (and in space), it’s tough to draw a straight line from action to result. Nonlinear factors can dramatically […]