So, pretend for a minute that you’ve been asked to consult for a company. You do a little research on them: they’re a name brand, their products have names your parents might recognize, and there are a bunch of hot startups providing the same service for free. Basically, they have a distinguished history and a lot of resources, but they are already on the wrong side of the disruption wave. In short, they’re getting their butts kicked in the market. These companies are sort of

I have been working on a new way of doing organizational discovery lately. I think of it as discovering motivations and needs. It’s a very different starting point for an engagement that what is conventionally done (OK, it’s new to me). Here’s how it works: My starting point is to find out how people feel about the place that they work. In this particular case, prior to the engagement, I used publicly available information on Glassdoor.com. I looked up the company and found t

The application of Swarming as a method can be broken down into four main contexts. For each context the process of swarming is different. Allowing for different contexts makes sense, because we really can’t expect the same process to work equally well in every situation. Even the simplest animals are able to exhibit variations in behavior based on the context, so why shouldn’t our processes? We change our behavior to match the circumstances. That is, unless we are using fixe