Description

LEARN HOW TO ANSWER ESSENTIAL MANAGEMENT QUESTIONS: WHAT IS GOING ON? WHAT SHOULD WE DO? WHO WILL COMMIT TO ACTION? WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT?

We are all general managers. We start managing from a young age, from the moment we start doing things for ourselves. We manage our school work, sports, hobbies and friendships. Eventually, we manage careers, families, social networks, contractors, and the day-to-day running of our own lives. Some of us may even manage projects, businesses, suppliers, large corporations, and governments.

Everybody becomes a general manager – there is simply no escape. The quality of our life depends on our general management skills. When our lives are manageable, we have a real chance at happiness. Management development programmes tend to emphasise business acumen, emotional intelligence and personal mastery, which helps enormously with general management. But this is not enough on its own.

This book helps to fill a gap in management development. It provides a practical methodology that enables anybody to manage anything. It offers universal principles and reliable tools and techniques that can be applied to any complex situation that needs to be managed.
The Systemic Stairway™ will enable you to answer four fundamental questions:

1. What is going on? Learn how to enter a complex, ‘messy’, unstructured situation and rapidly make sense of it using a systemic approach. Quickly identify priorities and where to direct your energy.
2. What should we do? Learn how to generate interesting new ideas that will enable you to rethink your mindset and make executable decisions with massive potential to bring about positive change.
3. Who will commit to action? Learn a reliable approach for project managing change and also learn how to execute strategy through a powerful commitment management process.
4. What have we learnt? Because management is messy and we learn from experience, good managers need to be quick learners, so an action learning process is built into the methodology to accelerate experiential learning.

The Systemic Stairway™ also provides real-life case studies that may resonate with your own private and work life. And because most complex situations inevitably involve collaborating with other people, you will understand the role of facilitation and how to help other people to help themselves.

DR JULIAN DAY worked for 20 years in the IT industry as a software developer, systems analyst and project manager. He became concerned by the IT industry’s struggle to implement IT systems with routine success and he started to experiment with new ways to address the problem. In 2000, his research culminated in a PhD titled ‘The Design of Collaborative Projects’. Julian developed a practical methodology for enabling diverse people to collaborate intelligently in all types of complex situations. One of the cornerstones of this methodology is the Systemic Stairway™, which enables people to find the deep simplicity in complex situations so that these can quickly become manageable. Julian has shared his methodology with thousands of people and as a facilitator helped a wide variety of organisations to manage their complex situations and implement their projects successfully. Julian offers Systemic Stairway™ accreditation.