Basic concepts
Listed below are some of the terms and phrases that you will come across in our website. For further details, explication or research, please refer to the bibliography page or contact us at info@human-insight.com.
AEM-cube®: the management tool that helps individual leaders and teams map their strengths and characteristics to the specific S-curve stages and dilemmas they face. Profiles generated by its 360° feedback assessment are represented in a three-dimensional cube which demonstrates the individuals' and team's alignment to their strategic purpose.
Link to further information on the AEM-cube®
ACT-cube®: a powerful, versatile new leadership tool currently in the research and development phase. A strategic development from the AEM-cube®, it is an instrument that will give organisations, business units and management teams engaged in large programmes the insights to maximise co-operation and improve collective outcomes.
Link to further information on the ACT-cube®
Attachment Theory: the evolved adaptive tendency to maintain proximity to an attachment figure or state of affairs; the process by which we develop a sense of safety
in the world – ‘safe attachment’ to people or things, as defined by Bowlby. Where this is
compromised in organisations, it leads to ‘unsafe attachment’, i.e., detachment,
insecurity, introversion, etc.
Business Ecology: the pursuit of successful transformational change in
organisations using the constructs of evolutionary theory, cybernetics, chaos and complexity theory (combined in the discipline of Management Ecology) through processes that embrace the challenges of change.
Business Ecosystem: the natural – and sometime turbulent – lifecycles that organisations experience, involving the total human and capital assets of the organisation. This recognises that all human activity systems are open systems; therefore, they are affected by the environment in which they exist.
Business Performance: the outcome of organisations developing and sustaining a healthy system which, at its peak of health, produces optimal perfomance. We maintain that the 5 key conditions of a healthy system are: creating Alignment, building Consistency of leader behaviour, ensuring there is Systemic Dialogue (a thriving neural network) throughout, recognising that everyone is likely to experience some Exploratory Discomfort - and taking steps to surface and manage this - and Building Critical Mass for strategic change.
Chaos & Complexity theory: the attribution of some emergent order in seemingly chaotic or unrelated conditions and the influence of ‘initial conditions’, sometimes called the butterfly effect, on outcomes. Eminent theorists have included Poincare, Lorenz and Mandelbrot.
Cybernetics: the study of communication and control, typically involving regulatory feedback in living organisms, machines and organisations, as well as their combinations, as pioneered by Norbert Wiener.
Ethology: according to two of its most prominent founders, Lorenz and Tingergen, ethology can be defined as the ‘biology of behaviour’. It places emphasis on the notion that the behaviour of animals and humans has evolved and can be studied as an aspect of evolution.
Exploration: people with a more exploratory bent will seek to gather information from their environment, analyse it and use it to help create the future. Their instinct is to do so without knowing whether the outcome will be positive or negative.
Feedforward behaviour: where we move forward into the future with just the kernel of an idea (e.g. a dream or a vision ). We have little idea what we will find but are, nonetheless, impelled to move forward into the unknown. This is very productively applied at the early stages of the S-curve cycle when we are in exploratory mode.
Feedback behaviour: where we take what we have experienced, try to understand the lessons implied, and use this learning to inform (and probably adjust) our behaviour. This is classic organisational learning – setting targets, tracking delivery, and using this to monitor our performance. Particularly visible during the operational phase, when we have set direction and agreed performance indicators, we use these measures to assess success.
Leadership Effectiveness: the principle that leaders cannot be omnipresent to all individuals or at all stages of an organisation’s lifecycle. Instead, they need to be able to set an overall direction, provide the necessary framework and support for others to follow and build teams with diverse skills around them. Their challenge is to apply both their own and the rest of the team’s strengths to maximum advantage. For leadership to be truly effective, consistency is key to the levels of trust and loyalty generated.
Leadership Gymnasium: a process in which a common leadership framework is developed that will influence and direct both planned and naturally emerging events in the business on a daily basis. Reliant on the development of healthy relationships across the organisation, the consistency of leader behaviour, honesty of dialogue and alignment around strategic objectives are tested for rigour.
Management Ecology: the combined science and study of evolutionary theory, cybernetics, chaos and complexity theory, as the basis for understanding the naturally occurring cycles of change that organisations experience.
Maturity: the concept of maturity is used to understand how well an individual has been able to assimilate life experiences and develop the capability to tackle complex, unsafe or unpredictable circumstances.
MDP® Process [mission driven priorities]: designed to help leadership teams drive their performance to new levels. Used across an organisation, it resets people’s understanding of what is expected of them and ensures that individual and team agendas are driven by the organisation’s priorities. The process builds self-awareness, dialogue, team challenge and trust.
Link to further information on the MDP® Process
Open-source: the notion that the values of transformational processes should be available or shared without legal barrier.
RPA® Process [results positioning assessment]: this management tool describes the Attachment-Exploration-Maturity characteristics of an individual’s role – highlighting whether their instinctive preferences and motivations fit the results they are being asked to achieve. Its value lies in the self-awareness and energy created to reach new performance levels.
Link to further information on the RPA® Process
Research-based: research is at the heart of Human Insight. Led by the issues our clients present, we are keen to understand the underlying properties that influence leaders, teams and organisations and develop predictive and descriptive instruments to support our collaborations.
S-curve thinking: an approach to understanding organisations in terms of their current position within an overall cycle of development. Used to define the leadership skills needed to take an organisation from a position (of success) in the current cycle or trajectory on an S-curve to the start of the next and new S-curve.
Systems thinking: an approach to analysis that recognizes that, in complex systems, events are separated by distance and time. Therefore small catalytic events can cause large changes in the system, or change in one area of the system can affect other areas unexpectedly or even adversely. This promotes the need for constant communication at all levels, recognising the linkages and interactions between elements that comprise the whole "system", rather than treating any part in isolation.