Be Careful What You Change: The Law of Unintended Consequences

Forrest ChristianCareers, Change, Coaching Leave a Comment

In your personality, tweaking one thing will change several others. Did you ever think that you could learn something about your career and personal development from chicken breeding? ‘Tis true! Read on, true believer: [Chicken] Breeders working over several decades chose the most productive birds to reproduce, resulting in white leghorns that each year can lay 300 to 320 of …

Elliott Jaques’s “Intellectual Odyssey”

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Douglas Kirsner of Deakin University spoke with Elliott Jaques before he died, and wrote up the results from the perspective of another psychoanalyst. Jaques abandoned psychoanalysis but would later refer to that as perhaps going overboard. It’s an interesting read for those of you who are interested in what he thought of things at the end of his life. This …

New Church Model Isn’t: Multisite Is Regurgitation of the Model They Hated

Forrest ChristianChange, Organizations Leave a Comment

This continues my examination of American Evangelicals’ organization of their churches, both lay and clergy. One of the big things in the Evangelical world, a real “game changer” they say, is the multisite church. You’ll hear them say things like “twenty years ago, the Holy Spirit was moving and doing a big thing. And people listening to Him said, ‘It’s …

Linda King finds working as a roof bolter's helper at the Bullitt Mine in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, more challenging and better paying than her previous job in a garment factory (NARA)

Accomplishment Does Not Equal Success

Forrest ChristianCareers, Change, Coaching, Warren Kinston Leave a Comment

One of the mistakes I made early on in my career was to believe that if I had some great accomplishments that I would gain success, including things like money and community respect. This is clearly false, and I’ve recently had a series of communications with an organizational thinker that confirms it. But first let’s look at some of the …

1958 Ford Edsel advertisement. You Know You've Arrived....

The Powerful Are Lousy Planners

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The University of Kent is reporting a forthcoming research article by social psychologists Mario Weick and Ana Guinote of University College London on how feeling powerful affects one’s estimates. The more people felt powerful, the more optimistic their completion dates were. And it’s not just a small effect: “power drastically reduced the accuracy of forecasts with error rates soaring up …