Explainers Archives - NOBL Academy

Personality Tests Don’t Work, Here’s Why and The Alternatives

Personality tests, we think, help us understand ourselves better. But in reality, they are often a self-gratifying exercise that gets us no closer to understanding ourselves or others.

Explainers

The Futures of Work: Fixed vs Fluid

Regardless of what the airport bookstore shelves tell you, there is no single future of work. There are multiple organizational futures stretching out in front of every company, and the road best taken is dependent on the environment around you.

Explainers

How to Reduce Decision Fatigue

Every day, we are faced with decisions that can range from seemingly minute to hugely impactful. Making decisions as a group is complicated even further by the addition of different perspectives, personalities, and opinions, so it’s easy for decision making fatigue to set in.

Explainers

How to Avoid “Creative Entitlement”

Having only a small group of people within your organization that identify as “creative” can lead not only to cliques but it can also lead to rule avoidance and unethical behavior.

Explainers

The Pros and Cons of “Radical Candor”

While radical candor can benefit an organization, it has to be used in the right context: specifically, you must have an established level of trust and respect within a team first. If team members don’t have empathy for their coworkers, it’s too easy to deliver harsh criticism and excuse it by claiming it’s just “radical candor.”

Explainers

Five Ways to Scale Change within an Organization

Technology can scale exponentially, people and relationships can’t. As you grow your organization, scaling your culture in a healthy way becomes ever more important.

Explainers

Why Onboarding May Be More Important than Hiring

Here’s a controversial opinion: right now, for most companies, onboarding is more important to obsess over than hiring. To be sure, both are generally important things (we’re not saying that hiring is unimportant). But right now, how you onboard talent is even more important than how you find talent.

Explainers

What Every Institutional Innovation Program Gets Wrong

In the last few years, many large organizations have reached the conclusion that the talent required to optimize their existing revenue sources is distinct from the talent required to invent the future. Today, the most savvy organizations will realize the need for a third team: those with the ability to take the refined ore of a new idea and shape it into a commercially viable and sustainable business.

Explainers

The Difference Between Autonomy and Independence

Individuals and teams crave the ability to execute their work without interference or complication. So instead of isolating, what should a division do when they feel their competence, relatedness, and/or their autonomy threatened?

Explainers

What Leaders Can Learn from Artificial Birds

With just three simple rules, a group of relatively disconnected individuals can form dynamic and useful group behavior.