The Blogworld of Poppyfish People Development

Technical excellence. You strive for it, you study for it. Ever since that first day at school when they opened the top of your head and started pouring in all those facts, algorithms, rules, dates, ratios, laws and equations you have been building the extreme specimen of technical genius that you are today. Technical knowledge is essential, it is the bedrock of our physical world, and for year upon year you have strived to improve your mastery of it. Technical excellence is important for all sorts of reasons, but at the most basic level it is important because it gives us power. It gives us power to speak with authority on our chosen area of excellence. It gives us power to get our foot in the door of that job we are seeking, it gives us power to earn reward and recognition, and it gives us power over other people. Neuroscientists are technical experts. They have power over me. The power I assign to them means that I believe them when they talk to me about the way the brain ...

Thinking things through with the help of a fully charged "Cogitator" Where were we? A couple of posts ago I put on “the cogitator” to consider the idea that Business Continuity (BC) and Organisational Development (OD) shared similar goals. In this post I muse on why it is that in many organisations BC can often appear to have more buy-in than OD. The victory of BC Business Continuity, with its emphasis on systems resilience perhaps pays testimony to the general victory of thinking over feeling when it comes to achieving strategic buy in to an activity. Ask an executive to reach for his Business Continuity Plan and you may well find he can locate a copy within reach of his desk, or perhaps on a memory stick or even available to him in a virtual cloud. He will have seen it, will probably have been involved in the shaping of it, and may even have tested it through an exercise or simulation. Ask the same executive to show him the organisational development or L...

Is Business Continuity a form of OD? It's a bit early in the week to wire up  "The Cogitator" and consider the world of OD through my own particular lens, but as I am delivering a Business Continuity decision making exercise this week I wanted to stop for a moment to consider the connection between Business Continuity and Organisational development. Does BC = OD? Simulations provide a key opportunity for learning and offer an opportunity to analyse decision making in a safe environment and are an excellent tapestry for personal development, yet few relatively few organisations choose to run decision making exercises for this purpose. In the field of L&D overall simulations tend to be niche areas, and not always regarded as the first option. I find this rather thought provoking, especially when the role of simulations is so well established in some other areas of organisations. Take for instance the field of Business Continuity. Business Continui...