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As commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), General Stanley McChrystal discarded a century of management wisdom and pivoted from a pursuit of mechanical efficiency to organic adaptability. In this book, he shows how any organization can make the same transition to act like a team of teams - where small groups combine the freedom to experiment with a relentless drive to share their experience.Drawing on a wealth of evidence from his military career and sources as diverse as...
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Five simple rules for foundations seeking to create lasting social change.
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Want to know better how your interventions can contribute to change? A Theory of Change (ToC) approach helps in deepening your understanding - and that of your partners - of how you collectively think change happens and what the effect will be of your intervention. Not only does it show what political, social, economic, and/or cultural factors are in play, it also clarifies your assumptions. Once a ToC has been developed, it can be used to continually reflect on it in ways that allow for...
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Donors, leaders of nonprofits, and public policy makers usually have the best of intentions to serve society and improve social conditions. But often their solutions fall far short of what they want to accomplish and what is truly needed. Moreover, the answers they propose and fund often produce the opposite of what they want over time. We end up with temporary shelters that increase homelessness, drug busts that increase drug-related crime, or food aid that increases starvation. How do...
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Governments and organizations invest huge sums of money in development interventions to explicitly address poverty and its root causes. However, a high proportion of these do not work. This is because interventions are grounded in flawed assumptions about how change happens -- change is rarely linear, yet development interventions are almost entirely based on linear planning models. Change is also characterized by unintended consequences, which are not predictable by planners and by power...
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The book describes what it means to say the world is complex and explores what that means for managers, policy makers and individuals. The first part of the book is about the theory and ideas of complexity. This is explained in a way that is thorough but not mathematical. It compares differing approaches, and also provides a historical perspective, showing how such thinking has been around since the beginning of civilisation. It emphasises the difference between a complexity worldview and...
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The Theory of Change approach demands a radical shift towards more and better learning in development thinking and practice, creating a productive and much-needed space for critical reflection.
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Yammer Co-founder Adam Pisoni speaks with General Stanley McChrystal about the lessons technology companies might take away from his new book Team of Teams.
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Rigour can be reductionist or inclusive. To learn about and understand conditions of complexity, emergence, nonlinearity and unpredictability, the inclusive rigour of mixed methods has been a step in the right direction. From analysis of mixed methods and participatory approaches and methods, this article postulates canons for inclusive rigour for research and evaluation for complexity: eclectic methodological pluralism; improvisation and innovation; adaptive iteration; triangulation; plural...
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Systems change has been attracting the attention of those in the social sector who want to deal with the root causes of problems, but, despite the buzz, much of what is written is abstract in tone. With the support of LankellyChase Foundation we have produced this guide to plug a gap in the systems change literature—providing accessible material and recommendations for action. Systems change has been attracting the attention of a range of progressive charities, funders and practitioners who...
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Why does modern life revolve around objectives? From how science is funded, to improving how children are educated -- and nearly everything in-between -- our society has become obsessed with a seductive illusion: that greatness results from doggedly measuring improvement in the relentless pursuit of an ambitious goal. In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, Stanley and Lehman begin with a surprising scientific discovery in artificial intelligence that leads ultimately to the conclusion that the...
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ABSTRACT. We elaborate the necessary conceptual and strategic elements for developing an effective adaptive monitoring network to support Integrated Coastal Management (ICM) in a multiuser nature reserve in the Dutch Wadden Sea Region. We discuss quality criteria and enabling actions essential to accomplish and sustain monitoring excellence to support ICM. The Wadden Sea Long-Term Ecosystem Research project (WaLTER) was initiated to develop an adaptive monitoring network and online data...
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