Mastering Turbulence

The essential capabilities organizations need to master turbulent change Rapid and disruptive change threatens the adaptive capacity of organizations, along with the individuals and teams leading them. Based upon over a decade of global research and consulting, Joseph E. McCann and John W. Selsky outline five capabilities highly agile and resilient systems must possess. They must be: Purposeful, Aware, Action-Oriented, Resourceful, and Networked. In addition the authors illustrate how these capabilities can be assessed across four levels—individuals, teams, organizations, and their business ecosystems. The goal is to develop these capabilities in tandem so that the individual, team, organization and ecosystem have High AR—not just greater agility or resiliency, but both high agility and high resiliency. The authors outline balanced development strategies for creating High AR that can be used to master turbulent environments for competitive advantage and sustained performance Includes cutting-edge concepts and examples that take readers from the latest advances in neuro-science and executive wellness to global supply chains and innovation strategy Contains illustrative examples and vignettes from leading organizations including Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, TECO Energy, Shell Oil, Walmart, and others Most important, McCann, and Selsky deliver a unique and practical perspective that helps organization leaders make sense of the dynamic world in which they operate.

What are the conditions for political development and decay, and the likelihood of sustained political order? What are the limits of established rule as we know it? How much stress can systems tackle before they reach some kind of limit? How do governments tackle enduring ambiguity and uncertainty in their systems and environments? These are some of the big questions of our time. Governance in turbulent times may serve as a stress-test of well-known ways of governing in the 21st century. Governance in Turbulent Times discusses this pertinent challenge and suggests how governments and organizations cope with and live with turbulence. The book explores how organizations and institutions respond to precipitous, conflicting, and novel-in short, turbulent-governance challenges. This book is a comprehensive and ground-breaking endeavor to understand how governance systems respond to turbulent challenges, and how turbulent times provide excellent opportunities to investigate the sustainability of governance systems. The book illustrates how politics, administrative scale and complexity, uncertainty, and time constraints can collide to produce turbulence. Building on prior work in organization theory and political science, we argue that turbulence refers to four properties related to the interaction of demands for action: variability, consistency, expectation, and unpredictability. Turbulence occurs where the interaction of demands is experienced as highly variable, inconsistent, unexpected, and/or unpredictable.

Traditional strategy assumes stability and predictability. Today's world is better characterised by turbulence, uncertainty, novelty and ambiguity - conditions that contribute disruptive changes and trigger the search for new ways of coping. This book aims to become the premier guide on how to do scenario planning to support strategy and public policy. Co-authored by three experts in the field, the book presents The Oxford Scenario Planning Approach (OSPA). The approach is both intellectually rigorous and practical. Methodological choices and theoretical aspects in practice are detailed in reference to the relevant literatures and grounded in 6 case studies the authors have been involved with. The book makes several contributions to the field, centred on how learning with scenario planning is supported by re-framing and re-perception; how this iterative process can be embedded in corporate or government settings, and how it helps those that it supports to do well in today's world. The book is written in an accessible style and will be a useful introductory text as well as a useful guide for the more experienced scenario planning practitioner and scholar.

We have entered into an entirely new era, an age of increasingly frequent and intense periods of turbulence in the global economy. Unlike past recessions, today’s crises have precipitated a need for businesses to develop a new mindset, one that takes into account intermittent periods of disturbance, allowing them to thrive while under the constant threat of chaos. Chaotics presents a revolutionary set of guidelines designed to help businesses: • detect sources of turbulence • prepare scenarios • predict resulting vulnerabilities and opportunities • develop responses to ensure long-term resilience and success • avoid risk while advancing the interests of the company • build flexibility into the balance sheet • price strategically • adjust products to meet new customer values • and more. Complete with metrics and measurements, Chaotics outlines a powerful new system for managing waves of uncertainty affecting customers, employees, and other stakeholders. In this climate of increased turbulence, no organization can survive with less.

Cross-sector partnerships are widely hailed as a critical means for addressing a wide array of social challenges such as climate change, poverty, education, corruption, and health. Amid all the positive rhetoric of cross-sector partnerships though, critical voices point to the limited success of various initiatives in delivering genuine social change and in providing for real citizen participation. This collection critically examines the motivations for, processes within, and expected and actual outcomes of cross-sector partnerships. In opening up new theoretical, methodological, and practical perspectives on cross-sector social interactions, this book reimagines partnerships in order to explore the potential to contribute to the social good. A multi-disciplinary perspective on partnerships adds serious value to the debate in a range of fields including management, politics, public management, sociology, development studies, and international relations. Contributors to the volume reflect many of these diverse perspectives, enabling the book to provide an account of partnerships that is theoretically rich and methodologically varied. With critical contributions from leading academics such as Barbara Gray, Ans Kolk, John Selsky, and Sandra Waddock, this book is a comprehensive resource which will increase understanding of this vital issue.

The essential primer for physics students who want to build their physical intuition Presented in A. Zee's incomparably engaging style, this book introduces physics students to the practice of using physical reasoning and judicious guesses to get at the crux of a problem. An essential primer for advanced undergraduates and beyond, Fly by Night Physics reveals the simple and effective techniques that researchers use to think through a problem to its solution—or failing that, to smartly guess the answer—before starting any calculations. In typical physics classrooms, students seek to master an enormous toolbox of mathematical methods, which are necessary to do the precise calculations used in physics. Consequently, students often develop the unfortunate impression that physics consists of well-defined problems that can be solved with tightly reasoned and logical steps. Idealized textbook exercises and homework problems reinforce this erroneous impression. As a result, even the best students can find themselves completely unprepared for the challenges of doing actual research. In reality, physics is replete with back of the envelope estimates, order of magnitude guesses, and fly by night leaps of logic. Including exciting problems related to cutting-edge topics in physics, from Hawking radiation to gravity waves, this indispensable book will help students more deeply understand the equations they have learned and develop the confidence to start flying by night to arrive at the answers they seek. For instructors, a solutions manual is available upon request.

Intense pressures pose considerable challenges to executives striving to succeed in an environment of increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Today’s leaders are constantly fighting to make sense of their changing worlds and to make the right decisions for themselves, their teams and their business. Yet resilience is not a given. It is a dynamic competency that can be cultivated and improved and there is not just one single way to improve the resilience of a manager but actually many different ways on different levels. The author differentiates between personal resilience, the ’resilience field’ and aspects of resilient leadership so that leaders can grasp how each relates to the other and how each can be used to enhance personal and collective resilience. He lays out concrete, practical approaches for overcoming obstacles to the development of resilience at all levels-extending the capacity of the individual leader, teams, group, and organizations to sustain themselves in the face of adversity. Leaders can follow the practical steps and strategies, outlined in this guide, to enhance their capacity to withstand hardships and adversity and create an environment in which people within an organization can thrive and grow. The guidance and strategy draws from a model of resilience focused on (a) fundamental human needs as confirmed by neuroscience and (b) the consequences of not meeting these needs. These two pillars of resilience define a leader's capacity to handle change, conflict, and ‘dysfunctional beliefs’- the barriers and sticking points that undermine a leader's optimal business performance.