Want training to stick? Work with the system

This article first appeared in Training Zone Want training to stick? Work with the system If you’ve spent years lovingly designing learning interventions and watched behaviour revert to baseline (within weeks?), this article is for you. Not to tell you what you did wrong. But to suggest that you may have been solving the wrong […]
LEGO® Serious Play® Systems Thinking: The Five-Stage SeriousWork Model

For decades, systems thinking has suffered from a visualisation problem. Leaders understand intellectually that ‘everything connects’, yet lack tools to make those connections visible and discussable with their teams. Abstract diagrams require specialist expertise. Causal loop models remain static on whiteboards. Computer simulations hide assumptions in code. The result? Systems thinking stays trapped in the […]
How LEGO® Serious Play® Makes Systems Thinking Operational

For 35 years, systems thinking has remained frustratingly abstract – intellectually compelling but operationally elusive. LEGO® Serious Play® Build Level 3 changes that by making invisible systems tangible and explorable. From Real Time Strategy to Systems Thinking The original Build Level 3 application, Real Time Strategy (RTS), was designed in the early 2000s for business […]
From Abstract to Actionable: How 24 Data Scientists Built Their Strategic Vision in One Day

In September 2024, I spent a day with the Data Science Practice at Oxera, a leading economics consultancy. Twenty-four people. One shared challenge: to develop a robust vision of their practice’s contribution to the wider organisation. The team used LEGO® Serious Play® to build individual models of what success would look like two years out. […]
Systems Thinking: Why It’s Been Impossible to Implement (Until Now)

In 1990, Peter Senge published The Fifth Discipline. It inspired millions. It described, with remarkable clarity, what a genuinely learning organisation could become. Leaders recognised themselves in the problems it named: the inability to see systems, the unintended consequences of well-intended decisions, the feedback loops that turned today’s solutions into tomorrow’s crises. And then, largely, […]
What AI Can’t Do: Developing the Four Human Intelligences That Drive Organisational Performance

Every conversation about AI focuses on what it can do. Faster analysis, pattern recognition across vast datasets, optimisation at a scale no human team could match. The capabilities are real and the business case is clear. But the more interesting question, and the more strategically important one, is what AI cannot do. After a decade […]