LIBRARY
Below are a selection of papers that CHÔRA has authored or contributed to. For more case studies & articles, please visit our Medium Page.
Collaborative Crisis Management: A Coordination Science Framework to Enhance Stakeholder Responses to Emergencies
2024
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Crises caused by a broad spectrum of emergency triggers are creating unprecedented challenges for local and global institutions and business entities. The capacity of a system to respond and recover from a crisis is strongly influenced by the ability to manage coordination among “coalitions” of involved agents and to support dialogue and collaborative leadership. However, coordination science and engineering approaches have not been extensively investigated in crisis management studies and practitioner applications. This article is positioned in such a research gap and it adopts a cross-disciplinary view to design a novel crisis management paradigm, which defines coordination as a keystone of effective and efficient responses.
For impact: make snowballs, don’t invest in snowflakes: Funnelling vs. Layering
2021
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Scale of impact and acceleration of effects happens not when Funnelling ideas, projects and ventures, but when Layering the intelligence outputs of distributed options and learning processes. To make a difference, we should be forming snowballs, not dispersively investing in snowflakes.
https://medium.com/@choraspace/for-impact-make-snowballs-dont-invest-in-snowflakes-ae25a3ac714e
Learning spaces as visuospatial instruments for working in/with complexity
2024
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Human social systems are complex and dynamic, perpetually involved in decision-making about themselves. Impossible for us, therefore, to see and fix their state and by reference to that design effective actions. To engage with the emergent and evolutionary dynamics of those systems we need to produce an initial, germinal, good enough rendering of their complexity. We introduce Learning Spaces as a cognitively engaging communication that makes available to strategic agency, decision-making protocols and governance processes a visuospatial multidimensional representation of the backbone of a social system.
https://series.francoangeli.it/index.php/oa/catalog/view/1274/1381/7067
Time as context: Kairos and the spatio-temporal aspect of strategic leadership
2019
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This chapter explores the qualitative, subjective, and contingent values of the Ancient Geek concept of Kairos, and argues for its utility in developing a pragmatic, adaptive, creative, and persuasive model of strategic leadership.
Portfolio Stencils: Action Genomes for Theories of Change
2023
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Change is a situated - and accelerating - experience, inherent to all social systems. To enable reflective Change, systems need to engage their own and their context’s complexity, manage its implications and their uncertainty, discover means, generate actionable intelligence and learn their ways into self-transformation.
https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/book/9781803927718/book-part-9781803927718-28.xml
Innovation: Managing strategic risk
2015
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This chapter establishes that Strategic Risk – the “biggest risk of all” – is a problem of governance that derives from definitional ambiguity and the recourse to obsolete paradigms. The chapter explores the extent of the problem, particularly in the light of recent market experiences, and articulates a solution. The solution offered is derived from recognition of the idiosyncratic qualities of Strategic Risk and application of a paradigm of strategy that is better suited to decision-making in conditions of uncertainty. Its value is that the solution offers a robust argument for substantive investment in innovation and a disciplined and prudent approach to innovation activities.
The Future of Development: “Making Happen” with Portfolios of Options
2021
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Arising from our work with UNDP and in Development spaces, this Green Paper makes a case for bringing Portfolios of Options to Development programs and initiatives as a core feature of their intent to transform social systems. Portfolios of Options as learning, sensemaking and problem solving mechanisms are the most effective means by which human social systems can supply themselves with budgets of possibility that ensure choice, create opportunity and ‘make happen’ transformation and solutions.
Strategic risk management in Suncorp Personal Insurance
2015
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Suncorp is the leading general insurer in Australia. In 2012 Mark Milliner, CEO of Suncorp Personal Insurance (PI), created an internal division to manage strategic risk, applying a framework developed by Dr. Luca Gatti and Dr. Kirsten Dunlop, and appointed Kirsten to lead the division. The journey that led to the creation of the PI Strategic Innovation division started with a program of work called Marco Polo, involving employees from all over Suncorp Personal Insurance.
SOURCES
Over the years, our work has been shaped & enriched by a wide range of voices & sectors. Here is a small selection of those who have inspired our practice:
Barbara Tversky Visuospatial Reasoning
Edith Penrose The Theory of the Growth of the Firm
Gregory Bateson Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Karl Weick Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations
Kenneth E. Boulding The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society
Martin Zwick Towards an Ontology of Problems
Niklas Luhmann Social Systems
Sally Maitlis The Social Processes of Organisational Sensemaking