Kimberly Wiefling

For years I’ve been using a rubber chicken in my consulting work to burn into people’s consciousness the concepts of personal accountability and a belief in an internal locus of control. Holding the chicken at shoulder height, I release it and ask why the chicken fell to the floor. Victims blame gravity. (Some people even blame [...]

I’m delighted to post this story on behalf of Emily, who sent it to me as evidence that she was becoming more scrappy. In this story Emily shows us how we can help our teams think things through and clarify goals by asking good questions and facilitating discussions that people are “too busy” to have [...]

On a recent trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival I spotted a whole mess of geese flying overhead, so I quickly snapped some shots with my iPhone. Here’s one of the pictures I took. Geese flying in their famous “V” formation have always fascinated me. When I see geese flying together like this I wonder [...]

Studying chaos, complexity, and non-linear systems has taught me that control is an illusion – and sometimes completely unnecessary. Complicated outcomes need not be the result of complicated processes, or tight-fisted control, as Dr. Stephen Wolfram illustrated in his combination door-stop/book “A New Kind of Science” some years ago (available to read for free online). [...]

The recent economic woes, and accompanying 10% official unemployment rate, have a lot of my friends looking for work. Down-sized, right-sized, cap-sized, some are entering their job search emotionally ill-equipped for the journey ahead. The job search process is discouraging, I think primarily because the task of getting a new job is 0% complete until [...]

Long before I knew what “it” was, I was doing “it” – systems thinking, that is. I’ve been thinking and writing about a bunch of topics related to this methodology for the past couple of months, and see no reason to break the streak for this week’s series of blogs, so here goes. Systems thinking [...]

Dear Diary – Well, it’s been quite a week.  After 7 days of heightened attention on my interpersonal communication skills I can’t say I feel I’ve made much progress.  Aside from some encouraging email from a few friends cheering me on in my (decades old) quest to improve myself, there’s no indication that a complete [...]

Dear Diary – In the “Dear Diary #2” blog I made a commitment to re-engineer my relationship with my dad – getting unstuck from the past conversation swirling around in my head about him.  (Perhaps you made a similar commitment to doing that with a colleague or boss after reading that blog?)  After recognizing that [...]

Dear Diary – Well, I might have gone overboard with my focus on possibility thinking and commitment to action in conversations…  So far this week I’ve envisioned 3 outrageous breakthroughs for myself, arm-twisted 7 friends or relatives to swear an oath to manifesting their own ridiculous goals, and committed myself to a half dozen preposterous [...]

Dear Diary – For Christmas one of my closest friends gave me a dish towel that says “Being unstable and b-tchy is just part of my mystique.”  Knowing that there is truth in sarcasm, and understanding the importance of good communication skills and positive relationships to project success, I’ve decided to recommit myself to improving [...]

Key success behavior #5:  “Do the right thing”, really wraps a pretty bow around all of the previous blogs on this topic this past week, and a great many more critical leadership behaviors that I haven’t mentioned at all.  Although incomplete, all together I think the five are an impressive list: Keep Your Promises Don’t [...]

This is an extension of my last blog about “Don’t Blame Others”.  Today I am not only urging you not to blame other people – don’t play the victim by blaming anything at all for your problems and failures.  For many years I thought that my troubles were caused by external forces.  My career didn’t [...]

Key success behavior #3:  Don’t blame others.  It’s not that other people aren’t responsible for a lot of the crap that you have to clean up as a project leader.  It’s just that blaming them doesn’t help fix the situation, and worse – it diminishes your personal power.  I have continued to lead projects only [...]

Well, this shouldn’t come as a big surprise to anyone, but I’m sorry to say I felt the need to put this one out there as one of the keys to success as a project leader. Key success behavior #2:  Don’t Lie.  I recently had lunch with someone who’d been lied to by her manager [...]

In honor of summer, I’m going to keep this week’s series of blogs bite-sized so you can get back to your beach and margaritas lickity split.  This week I’ll review a few behaviors that are key to success as a project leader. Key success behavior #1:  Keep your promises.  Sorry if this seems trivial.  I [...]

A while back Lisa Winter wrote a terrific blog about what leaders say when they make a mistake . . . “I’m sorry.” Her blog prompted me to explore a question.  What do leaders think when they make a mistake?  When I was a kid I was deathly afraid of making mistakes.  My dad was [...]

Inspiration is important, but we can’t depend on it showing up when needed.  It comes and goes, like a ferral cat who roams looking for a bite to eat.  We can feel inspiration waxing and waning within us, and the inspiration from the outside world can’t be counted upon to show up on a regular [...]

Some people in the corporate world still believe that people work for money.  But with a growing number of examples of people doing all kinds of work for free, it’s getting more difficult to adhere to that view.  Take Wikipedia, for example.  According to Wikinomics, by Tapscott & Williams, Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in [...]

As a project leader, part of your job is to inspire people to persevere in pursuit of seemingly impossible goals.  In my work, it’s not part of my job . . . that’s pretty much all I do.  A decade leading projects was the perfect preparation for this work.  Lately I’ve been spending about half [...]

If you’ve ever been inside of a tin of sardines you will have a pretty good idea of what it’s like to ride the subways of Tokyo during rush hour – only in the subway the sardines are still alive.  Even though we are packed together with greater intimacy than most sexual encounters, my inscrutable [...]

“Wicked Problem” is a label given to a problem that is basically a giant incomprehensible hairball of contradictions and complexity. Personally, I don’t feel prepared to do anything more than dabble in solving these gargantuan challenges. Governments, heads of state, and the United Nations tackle these kinds of things. For example, here’s a list of [...]