Category: Publications

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

We have a new essay published by Deloitte InsightsThe trust deficit between workers and organizations isn’t personal. It’s systemic. Trust is widely acknowledged as a key contributor to workplace performance. What is rarely acknowledged, however, is that there are both interpersonal and organisational aspects to trust. While the interpersonal trust between a manager and their subordinates is important, what is likely more important is how workers trust managers as representatives of the firm’s bureaucracy.

Continue reading

A new narrative for digital data

We have a new essay published on Deloitte InsightsA new narrative for digital data, a collaboration between the Centre for the Edge, Deloitte Integrity, and the Australian Data Standards Body that picks apart some of the continuing challenges with data privacy. It seems that every week the is a new announcement where the personal information for millions of individuals leaked to some fraudster. Indeed, if data privacy were a country then we would consider it a fail state. This essay compares Western and an Indigenous Australian framings of this problem to argue that our Western obsession with property rights might be the problem, rather than the solution.

Continue reading

Flourishing in ambiguity

We have a new essay published by Deloitte Insights, Flourishing in ambiguity, a collaboration between C4tE and the Deloitte Human Capital team. In a somewhat oblique way this builds on Strategy and the art of the possible by teasing out the idea that you need to act to decide in a complex and rapidly evolving environment rather than decide to act, as is our usual predilection.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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).

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading