Quantum Business Insights With Olivia Parr-rud

In today’s high-tech, global economy, every linear process is being automated or out-sourced. From sales, to marketing, to HR, the only way to remain competitive is to create a culture that inspires non-linear or creative thinking, thus fueling innovation. Unfortunately, most companies have structures, policies, and norms in place that stifle innovation. Other companies are doing it right. But how? Today’s guest, Mitch Ditkoff, feels that your company's most valuable capital asset is the collective brain power, creativity, and commitment of its work force. He states that this asset can be significantly leveraged when people are provided with the appropriate leadership, systems, settings, tools and techniques to think (and act) creativity, and the freedom to try and to fail .. Please join me and my guest, Mitch Ditkoff, as we explore how to build a sustainable culture of innovation.

According to Harvard professors and founders of Minds at Work, Robert Kegan & Lisa Lahey, human capability will be a decisive success factor for companies in coming years. Yet despite costly organizational efforts to build human capacity (e.g., personal-development programs, leadership trainings), these efforts seldom engender long-term change. After decades of research, they have determined that these efforts are ineffective because leaders often ask people to make changes that go beyond their current level of mental complexity. The solution is to understand change as more than just something to ‘deal with’ or ‘cope with’ – skills that are inadequate for accomplishing long-term, adaptive change. Fortunately, Kegan & Lahey offer a process called ‘Immunity Mapping’ that unveils our blocks to change and provides insights into the steps necessary for long term, adaptive change. This week’s guest is renowned 'immunity' expert David Zeitler. Join us as we explore our Immunity to Change.

Since the 1990's, as a country, we have become team-based in our approach to nearly everything. The motivation was the result of cutting out middle managers and creating teams. The problem is there has not been a deep and necessary commitment to training team leaders. The result is enormous dysfunctions at the heart of most management practices built on the backs of teams. We talk teams and know very little about them. Yet, all that said, we know more about team dynamics and high performing teams than ever before. Tune in to learn about the fundamentals of teams and what it takes to create high performing teams. It's not a how to program. Instead, it will be about hard questions you need to ask if you have the nerve to try and create a high performing team. Despite the fact that most of us have been part of a team, few of us really know how to build a high performing team. Tune in to see what I mean. Please join me and my guest, Rod Napier, as we explore Keys to Building A High-Functioning Teams.

Conventional approaches to management tend to stifle agility and creativity. Predict-and-control techniques struggle to keep up with today's rapid change and dynamic complexity. Time and energy are wasted in painful meetings, ineffective decision-making, and rigid bureaucracy. Holacracy offers an alternative and is emerging as a powerful practice – it’s a comprehensive “operating system” for structuring, governing, and running a purpose-driven organization. Unlike conventional top-down or progressive bottom-up approaches, it integrates the benefits of both with distributed authority. Everyone becomes a leader of their roles and a follower of others’, processing tensions with real authority and real responsibility, through dynamic governance and transparent operations. Please join me and my guest, Brian Robertson, as we explore Holacracy, a real-world-tested social technology for purposeful organizations.

In today’s highly diverse, global economy, companies are increasingly seeking strategic partnerships to expand their reach. This may require collaboration among numerous stakeholders within a highly complex commercial and governmental environment. To be successful, organizations must employ a mediated, balanced, and transparent process for negotiation, consensus-building, and issue resolution among multiple parties. My guest, Michael Sussman, has been perfecting this approach for almost 20 years through his work with the railroad industry. His thought-leadership and non-partisan approach to public-private partnership has gained him respect among all branches of government at the federal, state, and local levels. His framework and methodology serve as a guide for organizations looking to collaborate within and between a variety of industries and government institutions. Please join me and my guest, Michael Sussman, as we explore the power of multi-stakeholder collaboration.

Global economic volatility caused by new technologies and shifting markets makes it almost impossible to predict the future with any degree of certainty. This makes traditional strategic planning methods obsolete. Fortunately, new and robust approaches to strategic planning are emerging that use the concept of possible scenarios. This requires us to look at strategic planning in a whole new way. My guest, Gerald Harris, has taken seven basic principles of Quantum physics and translated them into concepts and processes for strategic planning. Instead of a single outcome, Gerald suggests that design our strategy to accommodate multiple possible scenarios. It requires that we incorporate learning and adaptation over time. This allows for a higher degree of control by being prepared for changes and surprises in the economy. Please join me and my guest, Gerald Harris as we explore the how to design breakthrough strategies with Quantum Planning.

To remain competitive in our fast-paced, high-tech, global economy, we must leverage our greatest asset, our human capital. Historically, human resource investments have been difficult to measure. Thankfully, that is changing... With the amount of data and computing power available today, it is now possible to design, test, and measure our human capital investments with confidence. This week we’ll discuss the steps to effective capital analytics including how to work with your stakeholders to decide what to measure, how to design a plan to include subject alignment and measurement, how to track your investments through your dashboard using descriptive statistics and correlations, how to optimize beyond business impact and ROI to descriptive statistics, and how to share the results in a way that can effect organizational change. Please join me and my guest, Gene Pease of Vestrics (formerly Capital Analytics), as we explore the value and benefits of human capital analytics.

In our highly complex, global economy, companies must continually adapt to stay competitive. The old strategies of ‘Plan and Predict’ are effectively being replaced by systems that empower an organization to ‘Sense and Respond.’ However, this shift can be a challenge for companies with deeply ingrained processes and systems. Fortunately, models are emerging from evolutionary biology that offer a new way of viewing business - as a complex organizational ecosystem. By clearly identifying the deeply embedded patterns in an organization’s ecosystem, we are able to understand and influence the organizational dynamics. Recognizing how patterns reveal the organization’s ecosystem is critical for understanding and influencing the basic infrastructure and ongoing actions necessary to fuel growth, profitability, and innovation. Please join me and my guest, Denise Easton of The Complexity Space, as we explore the value and benefits of treating our business as complex organizational ecosystem.

Have you ever noticed how globalization, big data, and the constant introduction of new technologies are causing our business landscape to be less predictable? In fact, it feels like it’s constantly changing.. which makes everything more exciting… or stressful, depending on your tolerance for uncertainty. The good news is that there are models from science and nature that explain many of these current patterns. These models see our global economy as a highly interconnected, continually evolving, complex adaptive system… a system that, with the right approach and skill set, we can navigate with ease. Join me and my guest, Steven McHugh, as we discuss changes in the corporate landscape over the last 30 years. We’ll look how these changes create a need for new business structures, processes and leadership styles. We’ll get some tips for managing uncertainty from a place of power. And we’ll lay the groundwork for deeper dives into many of these topics in upcoming shows.