Reinventing management thinking: Using science to liberate the human spirit

Jeremy Old’s twenty-five year experience as a management coach, dealing with stressed managers and stressed organisations, inspired him to write ’Reinventing management thinking’. His training as a psychotherapist has helped him see that the root cause of low engagement, poor productivity and leaden organisational performance, are due to the unhealthy brain states people habitually sink into when at work. In contrast to this almost universal negative, he sees people express the natural qualities of enthusiasm, commitment and desire to improve things when participating in his collaborative planning workshops. From first hand every-day experience he has witnessed for himself the new scientific understanding that the human species is a highly socialised, collaborative problem-solving mammal.

People love collaborating and they thrive off it, as do the organisations they work for.

Jeremy became determined to share this illuminating experience with a wider audience. Work doesn’t have to be tedious and stultifying; organisations don’t have to be bureaucratic nightmares. What is needed to vastly improve employee engagement and productivity is for managers to understand the reasons why they unwittingly demotivate their staff and undermine their own best efforts to manage effectively.

Jeremy developed the concept of ’organisational stress’ to include his ’30 stressors model’ so as to explain the cause of dysfunctional and sub-optimum organisational behaviour. Jeremy now uses this model in his ’organisational stress audits’ to help design stress out of an organisation. Remove the stress and you galvanize a sea-change in employee engagement.

Originally based on systems thinking and psychology research carried out at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Jeremy has used his planning methods in over fifty assignments and always finds them to be highly motivational and a rapid way to develop a turnaround plan or dynamic growth strategy.

Jeremy’s psychotherapy training made him realise that this spontaneous eruption of enthusiasm and creative problem-solving arose from a well-structured collaborative atmosphere. Essentially, team-planning meets a number of key emotional needs and this makes working together so exhilarating. He feels that if leaders everywhere can learn how to tap into this innate collaborative quality they will transform organisational life and we will all be the happier for it.