Here be Dragons was written in response to requests from readers of Beyond Crisis (John Wiley, 2010), which introduced the "Cycle of Renewal". Readers wanted to know what the Cycle of Renewal looked like "on the ground"; how would you get started? How would you decide which tools to use? Who would do the work? What would it look like on a daily basis? And, most importantly, what impact would you see on business performance?
Here be Dragons addresses these questions in two ways. The first, The Columbus Project, describes the journey taken by a fictional organisation (FutureParts Vehicle Supplies) which was set the challenge of renewing itself. The staff of FutureParts are entirely fictional, but they represent some of the characters and organisational structures that form the context for change in many organisations. The story illustrates some of the common hurdles and tools, so that business leaders may recognise some of the characteristics of what works and what does not as they spearhead organisational change.
The second part of the book is a Pilot's Guide to the tools which the Columbus Project used to help the business renew itself. The tools are designed to enhance the ability to think long term while being effective in the short term - balancing the paradoxes leaders face on a daily basis. Both parts focus pragmatically on why each tool should be used, when and how they should be used, together with the results to expect and how each fits into the Cycle of Renewal.
Author Biography:
Gill Ringland is an author, consultant and trainer on scenario planning and strategy. Since 2002 she has been CEO and Fellow of SAMI Consulting which specialises in decision-making and implementation, based on views of the future, "robust decisions in uncertain times". She came to scenarios when head of strategy at ICL now part of Fujitsu, where she built a billion GBP business in 4 years. Her career in the IT industry included software, a semiconductor start-up, process control, and research and product development. Patricia Lustig is the CEO of LASA Development UK Ltd an international consultancy group specialising in Making Change Happen, Leadership Development and Change Design. She is also a Visiting Fellow at Henley Management College and a SAMI Associate. She is a member of the OD Faculty at CIPD running their Scenario Planning course. Her most recent corporate role was with BP where she was a Senior Advisor in OD and led a team of OD specialists. She has also worked for Motorola ECID, Logica and Management Centre Europe. She has experience in the corporate, not-for-profit and public sectors from factory floor to Board level. She has worked in both developing and developed countries in Europe, Asia and the USA. Dr Robert Phaal joined the Centre for Technology Management (Engineering Department) at the University of Cambridge in 1997, where he conducts research in the area of strategic technology management. He has a mechanical engineering background, with post-graduate degrees in applied and computational mechanics. Research interests include the emergence of technology-based industry, technology evaluation, strategic visualisation and the development of practical management tools. Strategic technology roadmapping has been a particular focus over the past decade, to support innovation and strategic planning, aligning commercial and technical perspectives in organisations and networks. The focus has been on developing practical workshop-based methods for the rapid initiation of roadmapping, which have been applied more than 200 times to date in a wide range of organisations and sectors (for example, automotive, rail, metrology, computational science). Previously Rob worked at The Welding Institute, involved in technical consulting, contract research and software development. Martin Duckworth is a SAMI Principal who helps organisations think about the future. He facilitates management teams in the use of futures methods to help strategic thinking. His projects use formal foresight methodologies like horizon scanning and scenario planning to analyse external environments, and to develop the solutions and processes needed to move an organisation forward. Martin has used futures methods to help governments across Europe to develop Options for policy and to road-test strategic decisions against possible future scenarios. He is an expert in Horizon Scanning and has managed scanning projects for numerous UK government departments and agencies. Chris Yapp graduated with a degree in Physics from Oxford, and became a journalist on the Financial Times. Through seeing the attempts to introduce IT into the printing of the FT, he decided to join the IT industry. Most recently he was Head of Public Sector Innovation at Microsoft and at Cap Gemini. Before that he held a number of roles at Honeywell, ICL and Hewlett Packard. He has a long-standing interest in all aspects of innovation and creativity, particularly the impact of IT and digital media in education, health and local government. He has been involved in many projects around the creative industries and economic regeneration across Europe. In the third sector Chris has worked on issues including social entrepreneurs, the Digital Divide and IT and disabilities. He is a SAMI Associate and a visiting
