Skills are temporary; meta-skills are permanent.

Learning a second language gives you a skill, a learned ability. A meta-skill, on the other hand, is your ability to learn new languages. Developing that meta-skill, makes it easier to learn a third or a fourth tongue.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

• Recognize the Shift in Global Understanding of D&I.  Diverse thinkers come from a variety of different backgrounds.
• Build an Inclusive Environment. All people are encouraged to draw upon their unique experiences, perspectives and backgrounds to advance business goals.
• Use Multiple Practices and Measures.  Have solutions in place to monitor and retain a talented and diverse workforce.
• Ensure Leaders Model Diversity and Inclusion. It sets the tone for the rest of the organization to follow suit.

• Recognize the Connection Between Innovation and D&I. Diversity and inclusion increase innovation and reduce business risk.

The concept of cognitive diversity focuses on diversity of thinking and is composed of four dimensions:

• Perspectives. People represent situations in different ways
• Interpretations. Through diverse interpretations, teams can discover multiple resolutions.
• Heuristics. People resolve issues in different ways.
• Predictive models. Some analyze, and others look for a story. Both are useful for discovering workplace solutions.

Most companies conduct postmortems at a project’s end to analyze and outline the factors that contributed to its failure. But this reflection, examination and evaluation might not be as useful as most wait for failures to conduct them and stop the analysis once the guilty are identified.

Failures don't happen frequently enough to learn at the rate that’s needed to really thrive in a competitive environment. Learning reviews, on the other hand, aim to gather information and can be conducted after each experiment or iteration allowing improvements regardless of successes. 

To extract a full account of the incident, remove blame and punishment on an organizational level from your retrospectives. You get there easier by reducing the fear and biases that creep in during the investigation of failures, and by choosing reconciliation and immunity over retribution.

Often, the conditions that lead to the negative outcome would still be there even if you removed the guilty individuals. And if the guilty are fired, you lose those who are better placed to help you learn from the incident.

• Appoint an executive sponsor to work with a project lead to frame important decisions for senior leaders to weigh in on;
• Break things down (with decision meetings at each stage), and connect them up.
• Focuses on debating the solution (instead of endlessly elaborating the problem) and gather the right people.
• Move faster without losing commitment: get comfortable living with imperfect data and being clear about what “good enough” looks like.

• Identify decisions that involve a cross-cutting group of leaders, and work with the stakeholders of each to agree on what the main steps in the process entail.
• Work through a set of real-life scenarios to pressure-test the system in collaboration with the people who will be running the process.
• Limit the number of decision-making bodies, and clarify for each its mandate, standing membership, roles etc.
• Create shared objectives, metrics, and collaboration targets.

In the last decades, organizations are increasingly becoming more global, complex, and demanding of workers’ time. In the always-on, always-connected work environment, boundaries are overlapping and combining. 

If you can’t adapt, can’t see situations in versatile ways, can’t find meaning in the most dreary circumstances, you might not survive.

The downsides to always adapting, always flexible, always changing gears could lead to a lack of direction and commitment. In turn, a lack of direction could lead to failure.

We don’t want to entertain the possibility that it might fail. We just imagine that things are definitely going to work.

Detectives and investigators use the process. They ask both obvious and unthinkable questions.

Get close and collect information about how the problem is manifesting.  Understand where the problem does and doesn’t happen, when the problem started, and how often the problem occurs to generate critical insight for the problem-solving effort.

• Don’t look for solutions immediately; Keep redefining the problem until you arrive at the root cause.
• Don’t try to guess the solution; try to understand how the obstacles, or challenges manifest first.
• Gather data to analyze all potential root causes.
• Consider all options, regardless of how irrelevant they currently appear.
• Find a way to connect the dots. Make better analogies. One good analogy is worth three hours of discussion.

• All issues are best dealt with as soon as all involved are calm.
• Start with one-on-one conversations to get the details of the issue from both perspectives.
• Recognize that there is no objective reality of the situation.

Organizations don’t change. People change. Many companies move to change systems and structures and create new policies and processes but fail to address the underlying mind-sets and capabilities of the people who will execute it.

A new strategy will fall short of its potential if they fail to address the mental attitude because people on the ground tend to continue to behave as they did before.

Companies that only look outward in the process of organizational change, and dismiss individual learning and adaptation make two common mistakes:

• They focus solely on business outcomes and fail to appreciate that people will have to adapt to implement it.
• They focus too much on developing skills. 

...are sets of related components that work together in a particular environment to perform whatever functions are required to achieve the system's objective.

• Social systems: rules and structures, created by humans, that keep society functioning.
• Industrial systems: all manufactured material world, created to facilitate human needs.
• The ecosystem: which provides all the natural services (clean air, food, fresh water, minerals and natural resources) needed for the other two systems to exist.

If there is too much information, we tend to make the wrong decision, and even if our decision is well-researched and considered right, we end up dissatisfied. 

The right information, even if less, provides clarity to make the right decision.

A gut feeling, or an instinct, is often the right path, and points towards the right decision.

Ultra-rational, logical and unemotional decision-making does not guarantee that the decision taken will be the right one.