MAIEUTICA
We help major programmes to navigate a complex and uncertain world
Nurturing Maieutic Minds
A maieutic mind embraces ambiguity and radical uncertainty by developing an inquiring attitude. The scrutiny and validation of data, rather than the illusion of objectivity and transparency, is what helps the management of complex programmes.
Maieutic comes from the Greek term "maieutikos", Socrates’ approach to developing knowledge by asking questions, thus developing an inquiring attitude. Management and information systems cannot give definitive answers to complex and wicked organizational problems but they can help to raise the right questions when facing complexity.
THE MAIEUTIC MACHINE
The MAIEUTIC MACHINE is a set of principles that help programme managers to improve the quality and the maturity of decision-making practices in major programmes in the face of uncertainty.
When confronting unknown-unknowns, managers cannot simply hope that more data will result in the elimination of uncertainty and ambiguity from programme delivery and in improved decision-making. The MAIEUTIC MACHINE shifts the focus away from the mindless pursuit of more data for data sake. It helps you rethinking your current governance, communication, and engagement practices to profit from the collective intelligence in your team and surrounding context thus mediating the inevitable tensions among stakeholders, team members, and emergent challenges.
The MAIEUTIC INDEX
The MAIEUTIC INDEX provides insights into the quality and maturity of decision-making practices. Programmes often fail because of poor governance and communication processes. However, most of programme management is fixated with measuring outcomes. The MAIEUTIC INDEX instead measures processes to make you reflect on how to improve them in the face of ambiguity and radical uncertainty. It measures the quality and maturity of four systems and processes:
Governance Systems and Processes
Communication Systems and Processes
Communication Systems and Processes
Should be ‘intelligent’ and feed off ambiguity and uncertainty. But they often merely sustain ritualistic compliance and false senses of certainty by ‘window-dressing’.
Communication Systems and Processes
Communication Systems and Processes
Communication Systems and Processes
Should function as ‘townhalls of dialogue and interaction’ by optimising spaces to scrutinise and communicate. All too often, they function as ‘silent ghost towns’ seeking and promoting certainty and suppressing alternative perspectives.
Mediation Systems and Processes
Communication Systems and Processes
Engagement Systems and Processes
Should occur within ‘clearing houses of ideas’ that depend on the exchange of diverse views. Alternatively, ‘houses of concealment’ close-down new ideas, suppress conflict and amplify prejudices.
Engagement Systems and Processes
Communication Systems and Processes
Engagement Systems and Processes
Should be fostered on a ‘partnership basis’, motivating and pulling programme stakeholders into meaningful participation on a continuing basis, not a ‘policing basis’, keeping reports and controlling board priorities but the opportunity to profit from collective intelligence.
Why undertake the MAIEUTIC INDEX? Manage UNCERTAINTY
- Undertake the MAIEUTIC INDEX to support changes of scope with confidence
- Never accept the status-quo by challenging deep-rooted assumptions
- Commit to effective decision-making across the life cycle of programmes, from business cases-to-sign offs
- Eradicate herd behaviour within programmes and foster diverse opinions
- Reengage with programme stakeholders during periods of drift
- Tangible insights on the maturity of decision-making processes
- Aspire and motivate leaders with tailored recommendations to enhance the maturity of decision-making in your programme
- Intensify the speed of decision-making with confidence
- Neutralise emerging threats on an ongoing basis
- Training needs and support for trainers in critical friend reviews, providing tangible insights into roadblocks and enablers to project success
- Yield tangible results from assurance reviews through repeat assessments over time.
Undertaking the MAIEUTIC INDEX helps you to understand the maturity and quality of your decision-making across the four areas of governance, communication, mediation and engagement.
The MAIEUTIC INDEX provides insights on how you assess these four areas. If you are interested in how the whole team and various stakeholders assess the governance, communication, mediation and engagement of your programme, please contact us at info@maieutica.co.uk and we will be happy to discuss how to help.
Take the MAIEUTIC INDEX
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