Wednesday, November 10, 2010

James R. Lucas - Team Paradoxes



[This article was originally published at AgileScout.com. You can find them on Twitter at @agilescout]


"Working with people would be easy if it wasn't for the people."

"Competing ideas are not a problem to be solved. Competing ideas are an opportunity to be exploited."

The paradox management process:
Embrace - determine to fully accept and live both sides of the paradox. Take more risk and eliminate risk
Eliminate - Focus on identifying and ridding ourselves of weak, poor, and suboptimal ideas and actions on each side of the paradox. Centralize or de-centralize?
Enhance - Focus on identifying and optimizing the good, value-add ideas and actions on each side of the paradox. Have war-rooms and party-rooms. Give people margin to think!
Engage - Use innovation to consciously and systematically to merge the two sides of the paradox into a cohesive whole. Evaluate ideas.
Explore - Challenge the status quo by identifying new actions that grow out of the merger of the two ideas. Be consistent and change everything.

In summary, James reveals to us the need to embrace the whole picture. Paradoxes shouldn't be avoided, they should be embraced!


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