Across company boundaries: In some cases, communities of practice become useful by crossing organizational boundaries.

Across business units: Important knowledge is often distributed in different business units.

Within businesses: Communities of practice arise as people address recurring sets of problems together.

Furthermore, as a result of the negative behaviours and emotions, trust levels are destroyed, culture is damaged and people are very likely to disengage from their work and the team. Optimal performance cannot be attained in these circumstances. In other words, this is likely to be costing the business a significant amount of money, lost performance and good people. Having a bad apple on a team can negatively impact the performance of the team by 30 – 40%.

Sydney J. Harris wrote: “Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.”

Systems ideas are fundamentally about making distinctions (which creates a new interaction … between this and that) and the interactions between parts of a whole that you have created.

o establish what is ‘systemically desirable’ requires a process of understanding and agreeing what ‘a system’ is and how its purpose and other features can be understood.

‘systemic failure’ involves some sort of breakdown in the connectedness between people (probably in different organisations or parts of organisations) and between people and machines (particularly ‘information systems’).

We are also concerned primarily with human activity systems. One individual alone can rarely affect a situation that they are part of, in ways that bring about improvements. This is partly because of the unpredictable way in which human activity systems function, which cannot be anticipated, and partly because bringing about such improvements often requires collaboration or negotiation among individuals – interactions of a particular kind.

Iteration involves taking the output of a process and using it as an input for the same process. Applied to learning, this means that you repeat a process of learning on top of the result of the prior learning process, and this deepens your learning.

It contrasts with purposive action, where a purpose is ascribed by someone looking on, and may have nothing to do with what motivated the action. This distinction about who ascribes purpose to action is important in the context of managing change with STiP.

Your ability to manage change with STiP will be improved if you are aware of whether you are seeking to change structure or organisation or whether it is structure or organisation that is getting in the way of change

On the other hand, even as change is inescapable, much also remains the same. For instance, though many of your cells have changed, you remain the same person.

The traditional change model views top-management as sole originator of change ideas. Employees are construed merely as auxiliary implementers.

McKinsey estimates that 70 % of change programs fail to achieve their goals, in large part due to employee resistance.

Successful change initiatives start at the top. Make sure the CEO is a fully invested champion who creates a burning platform to create a strong sense of urgency.

Adding little amounts over time makes a huge difference. And the benefits aren’t just the small amounts added up — there’s interest accrued as well.

Professor Zalasiewicz added: "The technosphere may be geologically young, but it is evolving with furious speed, and it has already left a deep imprint on our planet."