Blogs - van Rooyen

Reflection 18 – Culture as System

Jan — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 10:21:20 +0000

Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing ‘patterns of change’ rather than static ‘snapshots.’ Peter Senge[i] It is often said that real understanding of a topic only … Continued

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Reflection 17 – The Past Runs Your Organisation

Jan — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:42:53 +0000

Understanding where your workplace culture really comes from Organisational culture is one of those terms everyone uses, and no one defines quite the same way. At its simplest it is just “the way we do things around here.” That short … Continued

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Reflection 16 – Triad of Change Management Systems

Jan — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 10:52:07 +0000

Total Quality Management, Business Process Re-engineering, and Learning Organisation. Most organisations facing problems reach for an intervention. Fewer ask which kind of intervention the situation demands. Even fewer have a conceptual framework that would allow them to answer that question. The three … Continued

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Reflection 15 – The Deal You Never Signed

Jan — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:46:02 +0000

What Termites Reveal About the Social Contract of Culture A worker termite spends its entire life building a structure it will never own. It defends offspring it did not produce and, in most species, will never produce any of its … Continued

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Reflection 14 – Levels of OD (Functional vs Strategic)

Jan — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 07:18:04 +0000

Departmental or Strategic Organisation Development. Introduction Organisation Development (OD) has, since its formalisation in the mid-twentieth century, carried a persistent ambiguity of scope. In its most familiar guise, OD is a practice — a set of planned, human-focused interventions (team-building, … Continued

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Reflection 13 – Why Organisations Look the Same.

Jan — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:02:43 +0000

Why Do Organisations Always End Up Looking the Same? Deep down, are they different? 1. The Central Puzzle: Despite the enormous differences between organisations in what they do, where they operate, and when they came into existence, they tend to fall … Continued

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Reflection 12: Strategic Planning Cycle

Jan — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 08:57:24 +0000

Strategic planning is too often reduced to an exercise: apply a framework, fill in a template, produce a document. There are many books and articles on strategy, strategic management, tools, and techniques to use and many more books on strategic … Continued

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Reflection 11 – Socrates, Critical Thinking, and AI

Jan — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:53:11 +0000

Socrates, Critical Thinking, and AI Living with questions in a time of fake news New Developments This topic touches every organisation, every leader, and every individual navigating the modern world. It provides a conceptual foundation that underpins effective functioning across … Continued

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Reflection 10 – Borrowed Risk

Jan — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:25:41 +0000

How the CEO Became an “Entrepreneur” and Why It Matters to the Rest of the Organisation Introduction Walk into any airport bookshop, and you will find a shelf of business memoirs whose titles, taken together, describe a particular self-image: the … Continued

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Reflection 9 – Laws of Nature, People, & Change

Jan — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:12:35 +0000

Laws of Nature, Their Relevance to People, Organisations, Systems, and Organisation Development. In this reflection, we focus on a few laws of nature from the exact sciences. Some of these will surface again in later reflections. The application of natural … Continued

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Reflection 8 – The Strategic Tower

Jan — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:11:54 +0000

Levels of Considerations in Strategic Planning Introduction There is a model developed by mathematician Eduard Lucas with many names but often called the Tower of Hanoi. The model comprises three pegs and several discs of varying sizes, stacked in order … Continued

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Reflection 7 – Strategy and Planning

Jan — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:13:00 +0000

Millions or Billions, wasted or well spent? Millions – if not billions – of rands and dollars are spent annually on strategic planning sessions. Whether all of this represents genuine value or significant waste is a question worth asking. Consultants … Continued

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Reflection 6 – Has Capitalism Failed Us?

Jan — Wed, 27 May 2026 07:40:22 +0000

Are we in a perfect storm? Open any news article, and it becomes clear that executive remuneration has become a contentious issue. To discuss this, we first need to step back and look at the broader environment in which organisations … Continued

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Reflection 5 – Change and Change Agents

Jan — Wed, 20 May 2026 07:00:39 +0000

Change, Strategy, Culture, and the Change Agent It has become a cliché to speak of the pace and degree of change in the 21st century – yet the observation is ancient. The philosopher Heraclitus (c. 540–480 BC) held that “on those … Continued

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Reflection 4 – The Eternal Business Story

Jan — Thu, 14 May 2026 07:00:37 +0000

From Hunting and Gathering to Strategic Management The basis of business – whether it is called that or not – has existed for thousands of years. Fundamentally, businesses still function along principles that would have been recognisable to our earliest … Continued

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Reflection 3 – Categories and Groupings

Jan — Sun, 10 May 2026 08:08:00 +0000

Science, Systems, and Change “If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts – physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on – remember that nature does not know it.” – Feynman, R. … Continued

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Reflection 2: Models for Understanding:

Jan — Mon, 04 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

From Parts to Purposeful Wholes. There is a deceptively simple model used in the development of training materials that carries a profound insight about the nature of learning. It is called the Whole-Parts-Whole (WPW) model. As the name suggests, it … Continued

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Reflection 1: The Choice.

Jan — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Changing course and why managing with yesterday’s thinking produces tomorrow’s failures.
If up to 75% of organisational change initiatives fail — a figure that has been regularly used since the late 1900s — what makes you confident that the next one will be different?

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