An exploration of the changing nature of expertise in a complex world and what leaders need to know about expertise.

What I’ve seen over the last 25 years are leaders who want to do more with less but aren’t prepared to change their organizational structure or culture to accommodate that desire. Consequently, it’s PEOPLE (and their families) who suffer the physical and psychological burden of constant context switching and noisy communication.

Not having agreed-upon communication conventions increases the noise in the system and incurs daily costs of delay and more context switching, which in turn lengthens time-to-value.

The way to ACCOMPLISH more with less, is to DO less to accomplish more. For most people the best way to deliver more is to change two things: 1) focus on fewer goals at any given time and 2) simplify the communication surrounding those goals.

While value may obey some simple Newtonian laws in a vacuum, value in the real world is rooted in complexity theory.

Decisions, value, and Newtonian mechanics in simple systems.

The decay of our personal time and attention follows a similar path to climate decay due to value extraction.

“… to induce change in behaviour, one can choose to either reduce the restraining forces or increase the driving forces.”

“Interestingly (and possibly related), these same organizations also had vastly different meeting cultures.”

“The cost of that decrease in effectiveness is rarely taken into account at the project level.”