As I try to do at the end of every year, I’m taking some time to reflect this week. There’s a lot to reflect on. Whatever you thought you would be working on in 2020, the universe had a different path charted. In addition to the economic and physical suffering…

Warm refreshments, winter fun, and social media. What could capture the holidays better? One of my favorite stories from Meltdown is about a Starbucks social media disaster that arrived just in time for the holidays. We’re providing an excerpt here to get you in the holiday spirit. In the winter…

What’s your niche? My friend Oscar Velasco-Schmitz owns and runs Dockside Cannabis, a retail cannabis establishment. We had a fascinating conversation on my podcast. Though Dockside is licensed and legal in Seattle, Oscar and his partners run a business that is, from a federal perspective, engaged in “an industrial act…

What do you get when you think in systems? I recently interviewed my friend and mentor Roger Martin for my podcast. One of the things that we talked about–and a subject at the heart of Meltdown–was how thinking in systems can benefit anyone managing a complex problem. Or, as MIT’s…

If you’re cooking Thanksgiving dinner this week, did you know that you’re operating in a complex system? One of my favorite parts of writing Meltdown was connecting it to the everyday. My coauthor András Tilcsik and I drew the central idea of the book from a Yale sociologist named Charles…

One of the things I’ve had to learn as a consultant and a coach is that my clients mostly want results. They have a problem that they want to solve: how to create a culture of innovation, say, or how to make their law firm run more smoothly. My mental…

This past week revealed that our democracy works–but barely. Regular readers know that I spend a lot of time thinking about systems — technology, teams, and organizations. This week has got me thinking about the American political system writ large. In 1997, Donella Meadows published an essay called “Leverage Points…

Holy cow. Doesn’t April 21st, 2020 seem like a decade ago? It does to me. That’s the day that Harvard Business Review published the article I wrote with two Seattle-based physicians on managing the COVID-19 crisis . The article was about how one hospital system built a sustainable response to…

I work with a lot of people who are trying to change something in their teams, small firms, or large organizations. One of the things I’ve noticed over the years of doing this work is that there can be a tendency to want to make a big, dramatic, “transformational” change…