How can we impact workplace performance? Perspective and Teamwork. The consideration of New Possibilities. Active engagement and active involvement with innovation. Implementation, (at last in many cases). And continuous continuous improvement. Captured in… Continue reading
A reality is that ALL of us know more than ANY of us, and we are often blind to new ideas because we are so invested and embedded in the old paradigms. Sometimes,… Continue reading
It is oft-said that Time changes Things, and maybe there is some truth to that. The notion of entropy says that things eventually reduce themselves. But in the case of real people doing… Continue reading
Change is always an interesting process. So is innovation and creativity. Communications is such a critical factor. How are you doing with YOUR workplace communications and engagement? For the FUN of It! Dr. Scott… Continue reading
Joan and I sit here looking at stuff and she wanted me to update a haiku and post it up, so she can see the process. Hope you like this one! Let’s Get… Continue reading
Not sure that Leonardo had the Square Wheels wagon specifically in mind when he said this, but maybe… For the FUN of It! Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization… Continue reading
Sometimes, you really need someone to challenge the group think in order to identify something that can be done differently to make improvements in how things really work. So, DON’T JUST DO SOMETHING,… Continue reading
Not published much in a while but LOTS of new haiku and similar things needing to be uploaded. Here are three in my LEGO Square Wheels® series about “the weeks at hand” and… Continue reading
Motivation comes from involvement and engagement and from allowing people to generate ideas for improvement. In The Square Wheels Project LMS, we gives supervisors tools to improve their facilitation skills. Fast. Easy /… Continue reading
Leadership. Much of it is about involving and engaging people in workplace improvement, which impacts performance, makes people feel appreciated if their ideas contribute to things, and which is motivating. But organizations can… Continue reading
I want to keep these thoughts simple, since we tend to make everything more complicated than it needs to be. Occam’s Razor is useful! So much research continues to support the reality that… Continue reading
We often find that change is resisted. I’ve written extensively on this in my regular blog posts, like this one on “The Reality of Change, Innovation and Employee Engagement,” and this one on… Continue reading
My friend Gary Loper shared the fact that we are fast approaching International Listening Month, which is March. Gary is going to be hosting a chat on the subject here and I thought… Continue reading
My “old” version of the new LEGO illustrations looks like this: and my son pointed out to me that this is NOT all “official LEGO pieces” like the smooth wheel in the middle… Continue reading
I was thinking about teamwork and how it tends to integrate with company culture while I was looking at some old powerpoint slides of quotes. I thought to polish up this one and… Continue reading
We often discuss themes of leadership, and there are just so many complicated models and detailed books that go after the explanation of what the best leaders do differently than the average ones… Continue reading
I am re-reading Gareth Morgan’s book on Images of Organizations (1986) and some of his writings on the mechanistic approaches to organizational design got me to think about how things work using my… Continue reading
My son Jeff had a great idea and simply illustrated it. He was reading one of my earlier blog posts on the workplace and group involvement and gave me the punchline that appears… Continue reading
The basic quote is this one: Good leaders push and drive and move forward, while special ones engage, collaborate and inspire others to greatness. The idea is that doing hard work by oneself… Continue reading
Someone pinned one of my blog posts that had a few optical illusions embedded in it. You can see that here: So, having the master powerpoint file for my Posters open, I thought… Continue reading
Ah, the animal kingdom offers so many examples of the workplace and behavioral choices. And, using those natural scenes, we can often see individuals in motion, building things and implementing change and dealing… Continue reading
Will work actually make you a Zombie or is that simply your choice for how you do things? Will you just stumble along unmotivated and uncaring about the world around you or will… Continue reading
Someone made a LinkedIn comment about innovation and improvement and I popped in a quip that I thought would be a good poster, so here we go: Continuous continuous improvement is a… Continue reading
It is funny how one thought leads into another. After designing the LEGO haiku I posted up a bit ago, another framework came to mind as I was thinking of these same issues… Continue reading
The Round Wheels already exist but most people are aware that we tend to use the Square Wheels more than the round ones… Let’s work to make improvement, For the FUN of… Continue reading
How many of us felt something like this just happened as we celebrated Independence Day on July 4 and went back to work on Monday? I, at least, try to address Square Wheels… Continue reading
One of the cartoons I have used for many years is what I called The Reality of Change. In it, one of the Square Wheels wagon wheels is broken and the team is… Continue reading
Another little haiku on the LEGO images and my theme of implementing round wheels on a Square Wheel wagon. The idea is that continuous improvement and intrinsic motivation come from people making small… Continue reading
There are tons of articles about time management and personal improvement and managing and leading people and personal growth and improvement. But who has the time? A mention of something in the LinkedIn… Continue reading
In reading a post in a long thread about how to build teams for organizational growth in a LinkedIn discussion group for HR people, I continue to be struck by the seeming reality… Continue reading
Here is another simple concept about alignment an over-control, illustrated with my little people: We need people breaking outside the boundaries to discover and implement different ideas, some of which will lead to… Continue reading
What do you think the reaction will be to this request? Consideration? Engagement? Or are we just too busy doing things the same way we have always done things… Who has the time… Continue reading
Another one of the standard business quotes from past decades is this quote about risk and action and reward. Getting things done is a lot about how risk is perceived, how you manage… Continue reading
Here is a BIG IDEA that is really pretty simple, really. To involve and engage people in workplace improvement, involve and engage people in workplace improvement. Seriously. Assume that people have actually do… Continue reading
I think it is pretty simple, really. To involve and engage people in workplace improvement, one needs to involve and engage people in workplace improvement. That is pretty simple, right? And a bit… Continue reading
“If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always gotten…” This is an old quote I remember from my NLP training 20 years ago and… Continue reading
Not always do leaders embrace change and improvement. Consider the case where the team finally begins to get things rolling downhill. This one is the basic theme of my series on, Nobody Ever… Continue reading
This is not technically a haiku in structure, but I am hoping that it illustrates a good learning point about despair and possibilities that already exist. Note that the round wheels are already… Continue reading
I put up a longer blog post you can find it you click on the image below, but here is the quip part of that message relating to: From Frank Herbert’s Dune book,… Continue reading
Hope you like this little ditty. Hats off to the Cat in the Hat guy… The Square Wheels theme is one of possibilities, but if nothing changes, nothing improves. So, the situation rhymes… Continue reading
A business tip on an idea for helping an organization make improvements in how things really work: Stop pushing and pulling the wagon and talk about ideas for improvement. And Have FUN… Continue reading
Now I start with some positive possibility reframing of the Square Wheels and the issues of Daylight Savings Monday as a possible day for choosing to improve how things really work in most… Continue reading
I did 6 business haiku around Square Wheels and change and thought to pop one of them up here. I actually will put all 6 up as a poll to see which one… Continue reading
That first little cute poem led me to making a bigger longer and maybe better poem around people, performance, innovation and improvement. So, we have something that looks like this: Innovation comes from… Continue reading
It is easy to motivate me. Just let me stop pushing and see. The wheels can roll smoothly and fast if we can just kick the boss in the (back) The ideas are… Continue reading
Uploaded into Slideshare is a compendium of some thinking on Teaching the Caterpillar to Fly and managing and leading change, something that I have been working on for 20 years. The slideshare contains… Continue reading
Making progress in any initiative is taking steps forward. Often, it is about working with others and being led on the journey. One often needs peer support, good systems and processes to manage… Continue reading
It is just so easy to do haiku with the image of the Square Wheels wagon, since it generates so many irrational thoughts about the reality of the journey, the difficulty of the… Continue reading
The Square Wheels wagon rolls forward. Not smoothly, but it rolls… There are all sorts of issues and frameworks and anchors to how things really work, but this one should help explain a… Continue reading
It IS a rat race at times, although one seldom hears those words these days. Rat Race. Guess it is partly because people don’t watch rats race much any more and horses and… Continue reading
