Predictive processing and a complexity approach to personal transformation cowritten by Adrian Wagner & Anne Caspari In leadership development and coaching, people often try to create lasting change through new beliefs, positive affirmations or, worse, mindset training. But lasting transformation does not happen by repeating new sentences or resetting the mind, as we switch a computer on and off. It rather happens when the nervous system learns a new way of relating to reali

Two Distinctly Different Logics of Change What prompted it is something I keep running into in organisational life: development and emergence being treated as if they described the same kind of change. They don’t. They are structurally different processes with different governing logics, and conflating them produces interventions that systematically address the wrong thing. The cost is a misdirection at the level of design. The article begins by getting that distinction right

How development is not emergence, and stages could be released Part One: Two Logics of Change What prompted it is something I keep running into in organisational life: development and emergence being treated as if they described the same kind of change. They don’t. They are structurally different processes with different governing logics, and conflating them produces interventions that systematically address the wrong thing. The cost is a misdirection at the level of design.

This article is about common traps when trying to scale individual and group coherence and argues for a more ecological approach to scaling change, using SenseMaker.

In case of emergence, don’t call a facilitator NOT ALL GROUP PROCESSES LAND IN COHERENCE. And even when they do, not all of them stay there. Many lose it on the way, and some never quite touch it at all. After our group process — the initial one in Alderlore and the ones that followed over the years, as described in the first article of this mini series of three — we began to notice that the same kinds of traps, diversions, and coping strategies showed up again and again, ev

The first in a series of three essays on coherence and group processes

Hope in an Uncertain Future Yesterday I saw a post on Twitter by a guy I do not know personally, his whole garden was washed away, full...

“On a scale from 1- 10, how close to the feeling of Infinity Are You?" Reflections on the Unmeasurable and How to Make Sense of It At a book presentation at the Hay-on-Wye Festival last year, biologist and fungi researcher Merlin Sheldrake shared a story: "I felt I had to study different kinds of hallucinogenic mushrooms, so I participated in a clinical study where I was administered LSD under close medical supervision. Throughout the experience I was approached every half h

With the number of decisions that we make every day, it is astonishing that the process of making decisions is not well understood. So, how do we make the best choice? The very act of deciding seems a bit like the piece of soap in the bathtub: the more you want to get a grip on it, the more it slips away. Much is talked today about VUCA conditions, and decision-making in complex adaptive spaces with highly uncertain outcomes, volatile ingredients and complex relationships is

An interview by Joanne Wood with Tomas Hancil Joanne Wood: I have avoided feedback for as long as I can remember. Why are you focusing...

Our experience working with leaders over many years has led us to the realisation that feedback is a perennially challenging feature of...

In my practice as a consultant, I frequently encounter people who claim that a lack of psychological safety hinders people’s ability to...