Seeing the Undercurrent in Organisational Systems

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This month we will hear from Paul Zonneveld, co-author of the book “Emergent: The Power of Systemic Intelligence to Navigate the Complexity of M&A” (Mergers & Acquisitions). In this session Paul will discuss the hearth of the book: the 4 guiding principles to successfully navigate the complexity of mergers and acquisitions and many other situations where groups of people, teams, departments etc. are either combined or separated.

Who is this session for?
Anyone can attend this session. No prior knowledge of System thinking is required. The only thing required is a willingness to engage with different ideas and explore the complexity around you.

About the speaker:
Paul Zonneveld is an executive coach and senior faculty for top team interventions, with over 25 years of international business experience.
He has a unique expertise in understanding systems, enabling him to offer insight into how to manage change and transformation for leaders of small and large organisations, those who find themselves in complex situations, or going through M&A. He teaches system sensibility, system awareness and effectiveness at various institutes, enabling leaders to apply systemic intelligence to their organizational complexity and influence the deeper dynamics driving their businesses.

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#44 Systemic Elegance (with Mieke Jacobs and Paul Zonneveld)

Paul Zonneveld and Mieke Jacobs are the co-authors of the recent book Emergent, which brings a systemic intelligence lens to the questions of how organizations get into and ultimately resolve complex challenges, with a focus on mergers and acquisitions.

Paul and Mieke have both spent decades working with the question of how to help leaders and organizations thrive. What surprised me most about this conversation was the deep attention to history that systemic intelligence brings to these questions of thriving. As Mieke said to me offline, just as human beings store trauma in our bodies, impactful or traumatic events in companies are stored in their visible and invisible structures. These events still show themselves in the internal relations and in the organizational culture.

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Source: mindfulcreative.coach

How to Approach Your L&D Integration Strategy After M&A

Before considering a collective onboarding of an acquired partner, four systemic questions should be asked.
The merger or acquisition (M&A) agreement has been signed and communicated, top leaders have shaken hands, the integration team is established, day zero has arrived. What is the best approach to collectively train and onboard the new employees fast? is often the first question raised to the Learning and Development (L&D) function.

As a result, functional heads, HR, and L&D join forces and start drafting a learning and development swim lane to be added to the tactical integration plan, including technical skill building, vision and values workshops, and leadership bootcamps.

The new kids on the block typically are not involved in the design and get overwhelmed by all the training initiatives. Even if there was initial excitement about the merger or acquisition, they soon may start to feel subject to a hostile takeover. As they lack the company’s history, context, and “do’s and don’ts,” it is unclear which battles they can fight and what not to touch. Most importantly, many of the large training programs turn out to be expensive yet ineffective; well-intended but counterproductive. The new employees do not buy into the new company narrative and become disengaged. Critical talent walks out the door and takes their technology or customer relations base with them.

Click here for full article (4 min read)

Article Author:
Mieke Jacobs and Paul Zonneveld

Source: www.trainingmag.com

The questions to ask when everything is unknown

Systemic intelligence is an indispensable skill for business leaders.
In the chaos of the COVID-19 crisis, the normal executive agenda has been overlaid, leaving leaders facing deep questions they were formally not attending to. In the space of just a few weeks, its become starkly clear that there are no simple solutions in our interconnected world.

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Source: managementtoday.co.uk

How to balance your job, kids and household while working from home

For many parents today, the family home has become their regular coworking space, with the spare bedroom or kitchen table taking the place of a private office. What’s more, working from home now comes with additional challenges in the form of additional babysitting and teaching – making things undeniably difficult. With this in mind, we consulted the experts for their advice on juggling work and family commitments during these tricky times.

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Source: www.spaceworks.com

Navigating the unknown: How to balance long-term goals and daily disruption

Mieke Jacobs and Paul Zonneveld, experts in systemic intelligence, set out their roadmap to navigate through the never-ending complexity and daily change in these unpredictable times.

We live in complex times. Most of our leadership challenges don’t have simple solutions. As David Snowden states in his Cynefin model – where he describes the typical dynamics and corresponding approaches in light of predictability and unpredictability – complexity can be defined by the characteristics.

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Source: www.what-franchise.com

Where best practice meets next practice: THE MOBIUS STRIP

Paul Zonneveld and Mieke Jacobs lead the track Systemic Intelligence and Organizational Constellations at the 2019 NPI. Both have worked with organizations around the world for many years, researching the impact of systemic dynamics, entanglements and traumatic events on large organizations and top teams (as a result of restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, executive leadership transitions, fraud, accidents, transfer of
ownership, etc.)

What they have discovered is that navigating complex organizational challenges with systemic intelligence, using the principles and interventions from constellation work, leads to profound breakthroughs.

The full title of their just-published book is Emergent: The Power of Systemic Intelligence to Navigate the Complexity of M&A (Rethink Press, 2019). While the foundingspark of this beautifully written and compelling guide, was indeed the authors’ work within the
context of mergers and acquisitions, the result is a book that goes far beyond. Emergent is a masterful resource for any complex business challenge where instead of !ghting symptoms, you might discover and work with what the writer Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls ‘El rio abajo el rio’ – the river underneath the river.

Read full article: Emergent_ The Power of Systemic Intelligence MobiusStrip_Fall2019

The Principles of Systemic Intelligence

(from the forthcoming book Mergers & Acquisitions: How to Turn a Forced Marriage into a Loving One)
by Mobius Transformational Faculty Members Paul Zonneveld and Mieke Jacobs

Paul Zonneveld and Mieke Jacobs have worked with organizations around the world for more than twenty years, researching the impact of systemic dynamics, entanglements and traumatic events on large organizations and top teams (as a result of restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, executive leadership transitions, fraud, accidents, transfer of ownership, etc.) What they have discovered is that navigating complex organizational challenges with systemic intelligence, using the principles and interventions from constellation work, leads to profound breakthroughs.

The principles of systemic intelligence 1) Purpose 2) Connection and Inclusion 3) Order and 4) Exchange help us appreciate the deeper whole beyond the distracting parts and symptoms that typically capture our attention and often mis-direct our energy. While these principles are of special relevance to mergers and acquisitions, which is the context of our forthcoming book, systemic intelligence can guide us in any situation where system dynamics are at play including organizations grappling with the full breadth of strategic and operational issues to societal and interpersonal issues closer to home.

Read full artice: Systemic Intelligence article Jacobs Zonneveld MS Strip Fall 2018