Resources

The leadership journey

David Rooke and William Torbert have put together one of the most insightful pieces on leadership I have ever read. Although it was published over a decade ago, Seven Transformations of Leadership has stuck with me and guided a range of situations. It charts our leadership journey from opportunists, diplomats and experts through to (if we are dedicated) strategists and alchemists. They discuss their research findings and what moves us from one stage to the next.

Margaret Wheatley has a deeply grounded perspective on what leadership means in a complex and changing world.

Decision making

Thinking Fast and Slow is a classic in helping to understand the biases that affect our decision making. The author, Daniel Kahneman, is a Nobel prize winner who clearly outlines that we don’t always make rational decisions in the way we think we might.

Team performance

Do you want to help your team work together more effectively? Patrick Lencioni’s ‘Five Dysfunctions of a Team’ outlines five barriers to team success which can help you diagnose your team dynamics and how to get the team to work well together. It may be uncomfortable, but we’ve seen teams transformed using this approach.

TED talks are one of the best resources we have for getting new ideas and insight in an easy-to-digest way. This Lifehack article suggests the 31 best TED talks of all time: watch them one a day and transform your life in a month.

Carving out a reflection and creativity practice

Here is a trip of books that explain why thinking deeply is harder than it used to be.

Nicholas Carr first wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly—Is Google Making Us Stupid?—in 2008. He later developed that into a book—The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains—that explained how the internet has moved us away from the deep reflection that silent reading offers us back to a state of constantly surveying the savannah for movement; a state in which we are alert for the new, but not able to reflect on it. He does, however, hint at the prospect of “swarm intelligence”, even if we lose our individual ability to reflect.

If The Shallows piques your interest in neuroplasticity, you should go back to the book that encapsulated the shift in our understanding of how the brain works. Norman Doidge’s The Brain that Changes Itself explains how the things we do every day affect the very structure of our brain.

If you find yourself persuaded that checking your iPhone every few minutes is actually affecting your performance as much as the research says it is, then you will value strategies for stepping back from constant connectivity and building your concentration “muscle”. Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, has produced Deep Work, a book that offers rules to improve focus and success. It might be tough message, but it is a compelling argument.

How having fun contributes to performance in the workplace

Sometimes it’s hard to justify doing things for fun. But often they offer real benefits to us, in work and in our wider life. Reading fiction, for example, can make us more empathic, sleep better and boost memory—all useful for our work. Check out this list of benefits reading fiction offers us.

Pretty much every piece of research done on meditation tells us it works. It makes us grounded, gives us more perspective, allows us a second of time in which to choose how we want to respond. And guided meditation makes the process so much easier. I really like the Headspace app (which does have an annual charge) for Andy Puddicombe’s deep experience stemming from his time as a Buddhist monk, delivered in a no-nonsense English accent in words appropriate to our busy and stressful modern lives. There are other, free, meditation podcasts like Meditation Oasis that are also useful.

Good policy relies on evidence but there is always a need to think about how to apply the evidence in a new context. Using Evidence: How research can inform public services by a team of Scottish academics is an excellent guide to thinking about the application of an evidence base in policy development.

Evaluation is a useful tool but is often focused too narrowly in in perspective to answer broader questions in multiple contexts. Professor Ray Pawson from the University of Leeds has a powerful approach to applying evaluation results to inform policy development in Evidence-Based Policy: A Realist Perspective.

Success in government programs and activities is becoming more and more reliant on effective collaboration between agencies – both within and across jurisdictions. Victorian approaches to joined up government from the Victorian State Services Authority includes a simple framework for thinking about the kind of collaboration that is required and the different mechanisms to support that collaborative effort.

If you’re in Australia and involved in any way in governance, you likely don’t need this recommendation, because you already know how good the Australian Institute of Company Directors is. It’s an amazing source of resources for governance issues. Some are publicly available, some only to subscribers of the Institute.

Big change is important to us. And big change can only be achieved through a coalition of people willing to work for change. So being part of a broader community of change makers is important to us.

We are offering our tips, tricks, shortcuts and reflections to you. Please take the templates, tools and thoughts and use them to assist you. All we ask is that you acknowledge their source, and don’t use them for profit.

What can management consultants offer?

The public service is under increasing scrutiny for its use of consultants. Yet, sometimes a consultant is the best way to achieve your objective. Read this article or download our simple checklist for how to get the best from consultants.