Recent Posts:
12. Personal Development
How and where can I develop my personal skills in Compression Thinking and decision making? Who do I need to talk to? Advisors? Peers?
13. Holistic Thinking
How can I introduce holistic systems thinking into my organization?
Compression Thinking Strategy
April 26, 2011 Although the Compression Institute is breathing life, it’s not on a fast track. We humans cannot quickly revise the criteria by which we judge work organizations’ success. Every aspect of our lives is touched. Even the language of the past is misleading...
What’s a Deming Fractal?
April 26, 2011 In a new book, Obliquity, John Kay addresses problem solving as seen by many CEOs and career politicians: wicked, systemic, dynamic, and wretched. Caretaker leaders try to avoid this with financial management that assumes a future that is an extension...
The Compression Institute
April 12, 2011 An advisory group of Compression Thinkers met this past weekend in Chicago. They formally decided to form a Compression Institute and form beta versions of local learning groups in several cities. A beta group is already underway in Indianapolis. It’s...
Hormesis and Non-Linearity
April 12, 2011 Hormesis is an example of non-linear thinking clashing with linear. Hormesis, in general, is that the effects of a substance at high and low concentrations may be very different. Vitamins like A, C, and D and several metallic elements are well known...
Preparing for Black Swans
March 29, 2011 The Sendai (or Tohoku) earthquake has been called a “Black Swan,” a totally unforeseeable event. Can organizations prepare for black swans, or that idea totally illogical hokum? An example of a pure black swan event was discovery of archaea, the third...
Systemic Bias
March 29, 2011 Systemic bias is an inseparable part of organizational culture, the common pattern of thinking that goes with it, and the premises by which all human systems function. Therefore each of us has a systemic bias. However, we may be unaware of its unstated...
Beyond Mythology
March 9, 2011 My own path toward Compression Thinking began almost 50 years ago, asking dumb questions in Economics 101. Economists seemed to build complex models on overly simplistic assumptions, for instance that all of us are motivated by self-interest – but I knew...
Compressing the Food Crisis
March 11, 2011 In February, the UN’s Global FAO Food Price Index pushed further above its former peak in July 2008, the same month that oil prices peaked above $140 a barrel. The 2008 peak subsided quickly because it was partly speculative trading, but not before food...
To Compress Resource Use, Expand Responsibility
February 24, 2011 Of necessity, infants unable to put food in their own mouths are totally me-centered, able only to squall for attention. Transformation into socially responsible adults begins with parental responsibility. More and more people nudge us along in due...
Phosphorus in our Future?
February 24, 2011 Phosphorus is an element essential to biology. Although a miniscule amount does the trick, nothing grows without it, so it has no substitute. The global market price of phosphate rock spiked at $430 per metric ton three years ago, and is now about...
Compressing Our Learning Time
February 9, 2011 Of all the things that need compressing, the most urgent is the time wasted connecting the dots of global “issues” with decisions that working organizations need to make today. We need to get on with them. Compression Thinkers have to be alert...
Taking Half of America’s Trucks Off the Road
February 9, 2011 Scott Brinks’ has a systems view of logistics after 30+ years’ experience in all phases of it, including at the C-level doing turnarounds. He’s moved all kinds of loads, thinks lean, postponement, reverse logistics, milk runs ... He has an idea: We...
Down and Dirty
January 27, 2011 Soil, teeming with microbes and mystery, like sex, still works about as it did millennia ago. When managing soil, technology gives us more options, but not wisdom. If we use it only to prop up soil until it wears out, we’re foolish. Depleted...
Making Time to Think
January 27, 2011 Making Time to Think Many of us work in a whir – no time to ask why; no time to explore any future consequences far removed. We do what is immediately necessary, like that line in the Charge of the Light Brigade, “Ours is not to question why; ours is...
Compression: Key Points
January 12, 2011 A small group of Compression Thinkers met last weekend. We decided to form the Compression Institute to make the ideas more operational. This thumbnail version of Compression Thinking came from that meeting. Vision: Assure survival and well being...
PortionPac Chemical – Compression Pioneer
January 13, 2011 Marvin Klein and Syd Weisberg founded PortionPac in Chicago in 1964, selling to the institutional and industrial janitorial market that typically bought 5-gallon pails and 500 pound, 55-gallon drums of cleaning detergents. Decades before the book,...
Living Off the Land
December 29, 2010 Picking through obscure news, prospects for significant “pushback” by dispossessed people seem on the rise. Pushback refers to NIMBY movements, involuntary relocations, and so on, triggering social unrest, and even violence. The UN reports that urban...
Collective Complexity
December 29, 2010 We marvel how individual ants with very limited skills collectively build complex hills and social systems. But human organizations must also collectively accomplish feats much too complex for any one of us alone. So what is a better way to meld our...