Category: Publications

The trust deficit between workers and organizations isn’t personal. It’s systemic.

In uncertain times, leaders should embrace ambiguity and adopt an “act to decide” approach, taking small, exploratory actions to navigate unpredictability. This method prevents premature commitments based on incomplete data and fosters adaptability. By tolerating uncertainty and leveraging interconnected ecosystems, organizations can thrive.

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A new narrative for digital data

The article suggests rethinking digital data privacy by adopting Indigenous Australian metaphors focused on relationships and responsibilities rather than Western concepts of property and rights. It argues that treating data as property fails due to its intangible nature and advocates for a framework where data is viewed through relational responsibilities. This approach, inspired by Indigenous cultures, emphasises communal care and accountability, providing a more sustainable and ethical model for managing digital privacy and data use.

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Flourishing in ambiguity

To adapt to today’s ambiguous and uncertain market, leaders need to shift from the traditional approach of deciding to act to one of acting to decide. Doing this means embracing uncertainty to foster a culture that values exploration and learning. Leaders need to manage their tolerance for ambiguity and cultivate attitudes and behaviours that enable effective engagement with uncertainty, viewing it as a source of ideas and opportunities rather than something to be avoided.

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How tax can help untangle the Gordian sustainability knot

We have a new essay published in Deloitte Insights, How tax can help untangle the Gordian sustainability knot, a collaboration between C4tE and the tax team at Deloitte. The essay emerged from conversations about how tax teams want to do more to support sustainability, but it’s not clear what to do as the team’s day-to-day operations have little impact their organisations sustainability footprint. What we realised is that tax is in a unique position to help untangle the gordian knot of sustainability.

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Why hasn’t AI delivered on it’s promise?

We have a new essay published on Deloitte Insights, Why hasn’t AI delivered on its promise?, a collaboration between the Centre for the Edge and and the AI Institute. This time we’re smashing together the ideas from The real landscape of technology-enabled opportunity and Reconstructing jobs to see if they can help us understand why, despite recent advances in AI, adoption seems to be lacking.

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How industries evolve

We have a new essay published in Deloitte Insights, How industries evolve: Interactions, not institutions, drive disruptive change, a collaboration with Damien Crough from prefabAUS. This essay builds on the observation in The real landscape of technology-enabled opportunity. that disruption is typically the result of the accumulation of many minor innovations, rather than being driven by some significant disruptive innovation, by showing how industries evolve when the verbs change (how organisations in the industry interact) rather than the nouns (disruption of the organisations themselves).

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Strategy and the art of the possible

We have a new essay published by Deloitte Insights, Strategy
and the art of the possible
. This essay is the result of us pulling together a few threads that we’d been exploring in other areas. The most recent of these was Negotiating the digital-ready organisation, where we explored the idea of thinking about the digital workplace in terms of three interrelated ecosystems: the human, place and digital. One could view this essay as the intersection of that ecosystems view with idea of the extended mind that has been popping up in quite a bit of our other work—such as being one of the underlying themes in our recent series on creativity in business.

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Investing in creative potential

We have a new essay published by Deloitte InsightsInvesting in creative potential. This essay is the third in our series on creativity in business, and explores how a firms leader’s invest to improve the firm’s creativity. The challenge that there is more to creativity than individual skill, and so simply training staff in some creativity technique (such as design thinking) will do very little to improve creativity. We need a more holistic approach.

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Negotiating the Digital-Ready Organization

We have a new essay published by Deloitte InsightsNegotiating the digital-ready-organisation, a collaboration with Alex Bennett at NTT. This builds on our previous work on the transition to working digitally, Reconstructing the workplace, by trying to imagine what this future workplace might look like.

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