Turning Employees Into Problem Solvers — HBS Working Knowledge

Ten years ago, the Institute of Medicine published To Err is Human [PDF], a groundbreaking report that pushed the issue of medical errors into the public spotlight. That we all make mistakes was certainly nothing new: Operational failures occur across all industries. But the impact of errors in the context of the health-care industry drew instant attention. Preventable medical errors resulting in injury cost the industry somewhere between $9 billion and $15 billion a year, the report stated. Even more shockingly, by some measures the number of patient deaths attributed to operational failures annually in the United States equaled the crash of one fully loaded 747 airplane every one-and-a-half days.

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Freedom and Responsibility Around A No Holidays Policy Changes Work Practices or Does It? « Creative Leadership - Daniel Pink

Netflix lets its staff take as much holiday as they want, whenever they want – and it works Silicon Valley success story, Netflix, shows how a non-policy on holidays can provide the break you need. Ah, August. It’s the month we escape the office, cast off quotidian concerns, recharge our psychic batteries, and – you know what I’m talking about – feel a twinge of guilt. White-collar workers have an uneasy relationship with holidays. On the one hand, we consider them our due. (And in much of Europe, paid vacations are a right fixed in the law.) On the other hand, we view them as minor betrayals – of our obligations to customers and clients, of our responsibilities to colleagues left behind, even of the values we hold most dear.

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The secret to great work is great play from Presentation Zen

Garr Reynolds Presentation Zen Blog is without doubt consistently the world's leading blog on creativity in presentation and design and here is his latest offering in full. The secret to great work is great play We were born to play. Play is how we learn and develop our minds and our bodies, and it's also how we express ourselves. Play comes naturally to us. I was reminded of this while listening to a cool little jazz gig near the beach in Maui a couple of months ago. I snapped this photo below of a little girl enjoying the simple beauty of that musical moment by dancing happily all by herself.I love this picture above because it shows both adults and a child at play. The adult musicians are expressing themselves through jazz, a complex form of play with rules and constraints but also great freedom, freedom that leads to tremendous creativity and enjoyment for the players and the listeners.

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The 7 Principles of Improvisational Theater as a Complex Adaptive System

I am in an improvisational theater performing group. We improvise full-length plays with nothing planned in advance. No structure. No outline. No character or plot development. Nothing, except for two locations we get from the audience at the beginning of the play. The play is then titled, "The Space Station and the Bathroom," or whatever locations we get from the audience. Two of us then run on stage and start interacting, and thus the play begins. When the play goes well, the audience says, "That HAD to be scripted. At least some part of it had to be scripted. It looked too easy." It was easy. When the performance does not go so well, the audience says, "That looked hard." It was hard. I became fascinated by what makes it work. What creates peak level creativity in our group? What allows a complex, coherent, sense-making structure to emerge from nothing but a simple location? What is the "magic formula" that allows a fully formed, organized play - with believable characters and plot - to emerge before the audience’s (and our own) eyes? And what gets in the way? Why does it work seamlessly sometimes and not so well other times? I became a serious student of improv theory - reading the seminal books in the field and observing the patterns in my group and other groups.

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Management's Dirty Little Secret

A great piece from Gary Hamel's Wall Street Journal blog on Management. How would you feel about a physician who killed more patients than he helped? What about a police detective who committed more murders than he solved? Or a teacher whose students were more likely to get dumber than smarter as the school year progressed? And what if you discovered that these perverse outcomes were more the rule than the exception—that they were characteristic of most doctors, policemen and professors? You’d be more than perplexed. You’d be incensed, outraged. You’d demand that something must be done! Given this, why are we complacent when confronted with data that suggest most managers are more likely to douse the flames of employee enthusiasm than fan them, and are more likely to frustrate extraordinary accomplishment than to foster it? Consider the recent “Global Workforce Survey” conducted by Towers Perrin, an HR consultancy. In an attempt to measure the extent of employee engagement around the world, the company polled more than 90,000 workers in 18 countries. The survey covered many of the key factors that determine workplace engagement, including:

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