I have been thinking a lot about what happens when a leader gets under severe pressure, usually because things are not going according to plan. It seems to me this is the very essence of real leadership and where leaders can really justify their salaries. BUT according to Professor Dietrich Dorner, in his excellent book The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations, there are two very tempting but ultimately disastrous tangents a leader can pursue in a crisis instead of addressing the real issues.

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A CMM for collaborative networks

Over the last year months a group of cluster facilitators and network coaches in Northern Ireland, including myself, have been working under the auspices of the Cluster Facilitators Forum, to try and develop a non-proprietary open model to guide how collaboration can develop between businesses through clusters and networks.

As a facilitator I do a lot of work with groups of small businesses who say they are interested in "collaborating as a network" (whatever that means). The conventional approach to working with such a group is to first build some trust, exchange company information and then start exploring collaboration possibilities. The problem is that this approach does not really work!

In a previous article, Virtual Enterprise Networks allow business scale through virtual collaboration I introduced the idea of a Virtual Enterprise Network or VEN as a way for smaller businesses to achieve “virtual scale” by collaborating on business development, marketing and project delivery for major enterprise customers.