Mindset Matters with Geoff Marlow.

If you’ve read Donella Meadows famous 1999 paper “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System” you’ll know that the two highest leverage points to focus on for systemic change are:

#2: The mindset out of which the system – its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters – arises; and

#1: The power to transcend #2 above.

So mindsets matter.

Even more so when you recognise that an organisation’s culture is not its “shared values” but can more usefully be thought of as the “system of mindsets forming and informing people’s awareness of the way we do things round here”.

Our mindset is the cognitive stance we bring to, and take from, a given situation.

Given that the latest generation (4E) of cognitive science tells us that cognition isn’t just thoughts in the head, but is inherently Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, and Extended our mindset isn’t just about our thinking – it’s also central to our doing, seeing, and being.

Join this week’s DD to poke about in mindset matters with like-spirited explorers.

Meadows’ paper: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/#two
Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition: https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/28083

Geoff began his career as a digital systems engineer with British Aerospace and the BBC, before moving to the open innovation services lab Cambridge Consultants Ltd (CCL), where he ran the Digital Systems Group.

When a CCL client asked: "Could you come and make our people behave more like your people?" it launched the career path Geoff’s been on ever since, helping clients create future-fit organisational cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.

He worked with Peter Senge and Arie de Geus on the Board of the Society for Organisational Learning (SoL) and with former UK Foreign Secretary Lord David Owen on the Board of the Daedalus Trust, established to address and ameliorate negative personality changes associated with the exercise of power – commonly referred to as “Hubris Syndrome”.

He publishes regularly on the Create a Future-Fit Culture Substack channel: https://geoffmarlow.substack.com/

Connect with Geoff Marlow on Linkedin