Reveln Consulting

Beyond Resilience: Black Swans, Anti-Fragility and Change

Random, extreme events: What are our options when we confront events we don’t understand? Is it possible to develop characteristics to emulate strengths in nature in becoming antifragile as described by former wall street trader, now academic, Nassim Nicholas Taleb?

“When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Here are some insights into Taleb’s approach, especially relevant today:

Building Resilent & Anti-Fragile Orgs VSHRM Deborah Nystrom, REVELN from Deb Nystrom

Nassim’s credentials:

3 Things That Cause Ethical Breakdowns in Workplace Culture: Timing a Reminder is Everything

Tensions among senior staff in universities seem to be making the news on a regular basis. Examples include leader strife at Rutgers (blame), Penn State (cascade failure to deal with a crime) and University of Virginia (abrupt leadership goings and comings.)

Using Jung to Clarify the Power of Introversion and Extroversion in Coaching

Learn how to move out of the shallows of those old introvert & extrovert labels.

What’s best used as a combo with other aspects of personality? Introversion and Extroversion.

The famed psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, is one of the few that has added clarity to the oversimplification or archaic use of introversion & extroversion in modern times. Assessments of the past, like the Myers Briggs Type Indicator^TM have helped many people better understand Jung’s complex explanations about personality so that they are more accessible and useful in the world.

Seven (7) Ways to Respond to Bullying and a Queen Bee

Are you experiencing prolonged harassment? It may be that you may have just encountered a bully, or, when adding gender into the mix, experiencing an adult “mean girl.” As the number of women in the workforce and in leadership increases, stress in leadership roles has naturally affected women, as it does men, and can include gender-nuanced displays of ongoing aggression.

Business Entrepreneur Storytelling at Entre-Slam with Deb

Entre-Slam is an entrepreneurial story telling competition held in Ann Arbor. Storytelling is powerful – and is a key leadership tool. Telling my story was also a great way to illustrate storytelling as important to change and communicating complex ideas, including my history in organization development (OD).

Deb, Entre-Slam in Detroit — Deb’s most recent Entre-Slam in Detroit, Fall 2013

Explaining OD to the uninitiated is like describing “Business Intelligence” or “databases” to optometrists, professional athletes or golf pros. Really, why should they care without a good story?

In my situation, this was a signal to myself to enter the speaking circuit. I also wanted to place in the top three, so I did something rather unusual for a story telling slam – a rap. I had a lot to memorize in a short time, so I prepared for this. The theme was also useful to my professional focus on change; it was Arising from Failure.

Two Tried & True Change Models – Evergreen for Agile Change

“There isn’t anything so practical as” a good model to help leaders, change agents and advocates explain what is happening in change and transition, paraphrasing Kurt Lewin. An informed change leader can head off the deadly effects of compliance and indifference and increase true, community commitment with a good set of tools, facilitation skills and change research, informed by timely data.

Messing up a Change Implementation with Someone Else’s Learning Culture?

Netflix culture and their lack of need for leadership development is SO attractive, like the siren song of Greek myth. It creates great press for Netflix, yet it is so un-duplicatable without the right staffing & culture values mix.

Once again, culture trumps strategy every time. Helping culture to shift using smart, agile strategy is the big challenge of change work. It’s not work for the amateur.

Siren Song This is the one song everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible: the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons even though they see the beached skulls… Excerpt from Siren Song by Margaret Atwood — Siren Song
“the song
that is irresistible:
the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see the beached skulls…”
Excerpt from Siren Song by Margaret Atwood

There’s No Such Thing as Leadership? Pull, Influence and “Open Space” vs. Power

This post features the leadership vs. management thinking of Peter Drucker as well as the distributed power concepts of Open Space methodology, a way to give voice to everyone that is balanced by hidden and overt guidelines and principles inherent to any group or organization.

There’s the often asked question, “What is management vs. what is leadership? This question is more about power and influence, though it continues to be asked. At the time I wrote this originally posted, a web search on the question delivered 176 million results. Today when updating this post, the count is 1,950,000,000 results.

Agile Leader Learning for Sustainable Change: Steps through Sharp Rocks

You’ve probably experienced it, that uncomfortable feeling of letting go of something tried and formerly true without knowing what is coming next. Welcome to the Neutral Zone, coined by change writer William Bridges¹who helped us understand the human element in Change.

In the 21st century, it’s important to “unlearn” what no longer meets the needs of your clients/customers. Creating a “quiet mind” to understand what will meet those needs is one the BEST things you could do to adapt, to become agile and to stay relevant in the business world today. Coaching with iterative practice and using fractals as a model for learning are a two ways to build an adaptive learning approach that also happens to be flexible, most likely far cheaper and is less prone to the scarcity and rigidity traps of conventional certification programs and training. More examples are listed below.

Change and Endings: Letting Go and Acceptance before New Beginnings

Successful transition through endings is a necessary skill in the 21st century. A William Bridges classic gives insights into helping endings succeed.

Sometimes an ending is a major, transformative revelation for a business, such as when CEO Darwin Smith exclaimed they needed to shut down the paper mills leading the shift to a new way of doing business.