Simple Habits for Complex Times Quotes

“The point isn’t to be the hero and solve things; the point of the leader in a complex world is to enable and unleash as many heroes and as many solutions as possible.”
― Jennifer Garvey Berger, Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders

“In study after study, researchers find that if people are unclear about where they are going, they’ll just default to their old patterns and habits.”
― Jennifer Garvey Berger, Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders

“In a simpler world, perhaps unilateral power held by a single, smart, capable leader could rule the day. In a complex world, as we’ll explore together, it takes a collective sharing of power, creativity, and perspectives to become agile and nuanced enough to lead into the uncertain future.”
― Jennifer Garvey Berger, Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders

“if you’re not failing, you’re not actually being particularly experimental).”
― Jennifer Garvey Berger, Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders

“Don’t come to someone with feedback (or a problem) unless you have one or more solutions—In this approach the responsibility lies with the person giving the feedback to also come up with the best solution for acting on the feedback. That sounds totally reasonable and helpful: you’re telling people about the problem and the solution in one bite. • The feedback sandwich—You know this one. You open with good news, slip in some bad news, and then close with good news. That way, the person in front of you is opened up for the bad news by hearing the good news and still likes you in the end because you’ve closed with something good.6 And we’re supposed to give more positive feedback than negative feedback (the best ratio is at least 3:17), so this puts us well on our way to that. • Socratic questioning—Here, you leave people to draw their own conclusions by simply asking a set of helpful questions to take them to the realization that there’s an issue (and the hope is that they’ll then ask you for a solution or even stumble on your solution and offer it up as if it were their own). This, we’re told, increases ownership of the issue because the other person—the person needing to change—came up with the idea himself.”
― Jennifer Garvey Berger, Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders

“The key lever in a complex system is learning; the key methods are conversation, discovery, and experimentation.14 In a complicated case, you have distinct times for diagnosing the problem, coming up with the solution, and then implementing that solution.”
― Jennifer Garvey Berger, Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders