Leadership and organisational change starts with thinking: thinking about problems, thinking about possibilities and thinking about capabilities. But thinking never occurs in a vacuum. Long gone are the days when a chief executive officer would disappear for weeks with a towel over their head only to reappear to announce ‘the strategy’ to the organisation. Thinking is of course a social activity that sees people coming together to develop and share ideas. The job of leadership is to exercise mastery over the process of social thinking in order to engage workers, to generate innovative ideas and to bring about change where needed. This paper considers the habits of social thinking, with reference to those found in the UK Civil Service, and proposes tools for leaders to significantly enhance their success.
Robin Ryde (Fri,) studied this question.