Year: 2022

The Art of Simplification

Per­fec­tion is achieved not when there is noth­ing more to add but when there is noth­ing left to take away. This stan­dard, craft­ed by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, sug­gests some poten­tial for improve­ment in pub­lic admin­is­tra­tion and large cor­po­ra­tions. But what is the rea­son that the rules are becom­ing more and more and the process­es more and more com­pli­cat­ed? Per­haps, in the end, it is sim­ply due to our ten­den­cy to seek solu­tions by adding rather than solv­ing the prob­lem by omit­ting, as demon­strat­ed in recent research.

Hybrid working: A matter of time, not location

Com­pa­nies are cur­rent­ly grap­pling with the ques­tion of how much their employ­ees should work in the office and how much home office or remote work­ing should be allowed. After the expe­ri­ence of the last two years of the Coro­na pan­dem­ic, the desire to com­bine the best of home and office in hybrid forms of work­ing is laud­able. Still, it should not be reduced to the ques­tion of the pos­si­ble and per­mit­ted place of work. In essence, it is more about flex­i­bil­i­ty in terms of time than location.

How the Pandemic Disrupted the World of Work

Strokes of fate often cause peo­ple to pause and reflect on their own lives, fol­lowed by a reori­en­ta­tion. Due to the Coro­na pan­dem­ic, many employ­ees are now ask­ing them­selves how they want to work in the future. Their answer is already emerg­ing in the USA as the “Great Res­ig­na­tion.” Although this wave is flat­ter in Ger­many, it is still rea­son enough to think about the cru­cial role of lead­er­ship in the post-pan­dem­ic age.

First the Problem, Then the Solution!

Agile frame­works are col­lec­tions of gen­er­al­ized solu­tions to typ­i­cal prob­lems in agile orga­ni­za­tions. Apply­ing these solu­tions works best when the pain of the prob­lem is felt instead of just under­stood the­o­ret­i­cal­ly. An agile trans­for­ma­tion is not an intro­duc­tion of a frame­work but a joint jour­ney on which obsta­cles are dis­cov­ered and solved with the help of the known frameworks. 

He Who Says A Does Not Have to Say B

When real­i­ty con­tra­dicts our beliefs and world­views, we have sev­er­al ways to resolve this cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance. Most peo­ple tend to cre­ative­ly rein­ter­pret real­i­ty to fit the expe­ri­ences into their men­tal mod­el pic­ture. Yet, it is more help­ful to use the dis­crep­an­cies as a source of insight and adjust one’s world­view, espe­cial­ly for lead­ers whose world­views and beliefs affect many others.