Many leaders find it difficult to respond constructively to failure. After all, if we are no longer allowed to blame an employee when something goes wrong, how can we ensure that employees will still do their best to perform as well as possible? Although many organisations consider learning from failure important, very few of them actually take a good approach to it. Why? Because most managers look at failure the wrong way.

Professor of Human Resources Management Dirk Buyens does not regard the changes prompted by digitisation as in any way troubling. ‘We have to learn to understand the reasons why employees may or may not be engaging.’

COOs increasingly operate on strategic levels, translating external developments into their organisations and implementing necessary internal changes. However, in practice, these continuous changes raise dilemmas. This balance between innovation and continuity is the topic of conversation of a new advisory board in Management Scope magazine. Three Dutch COOs and Professor of Leadership and Coaching, Katleen De Stobbeleir, together devise six best practices to allow problem-free navigation between innovation and continuity.

Digital transformation is a means of survival in the turbulent times that we are currently experiencing and that still lie ahead of us, according to Professor Stijn Viaene. “We have to make this cumbersome tanker change course. We may need to transform it into a fleet of sailing boats - provided that we give everyone the chance to stay on board. Because not only is this our damned duty; it is also the only way that we will be able to pull through.”

How do you, as a leader, deal with such a vague concept as 'the skills for the 21st century'? And what competencies do you need to develop among your employees to make them future proof? Professor Katleen De Stobbeleir advises us to start mapping the challenges today's employees face first.

Curiosity means having an interest in situations from which you can potentially learn, or a desire for new experiences. And a curious mindset has many advantages for organisations, managers and staff. Professor of Leadership Karlien Vanderheyden talks about the different dimensions of curiosity and shows you how to exhibit curiosity as a leader as well as spark curiosity in your staff.

Most of the management principles which we apply today were actually invented 100 years ago. To a great extent, we are still stuck in the basic ideas of that time. According to Dean Marion Debruyne we cannot run and manage organisations which need to be ready for the 21st century using principles from the last century. Along with technological change, we need management change and a different kind of leadership. That’s why unlearning old mental models is just as important as learning new things.

How do you get your people to adopt the smart technology that is invading the supply chain? How can man and machine work together? What about trust? These are the questions our new Centre on People in the Smart, Digitised Supply Chain will dive into. At the steering wheel are professors Ann Vereecke and Karlien Vanderheyden.

The rise of fake news is also putting leaders in the danger zone. The number of wrong decisions threatens to reach unforeseen proportions. With these six strategies you can make sure that you make well-founded decisions that are not only based on emotion or on what is 'new'.

Do CEOs really take decisions differently from other people? Is it true that they tend to look more to the future and have a broader view of reality, or is it simply in their character to make bold decisions? Professor Kerstin Fehre explains that we often forget that CEOs are, first and foremost, human beings. We have a tendency to see them as machines that take very rational decisions, which obviously they are not. CEOs are only human and have limited cognitive filters and rational capacities. Professor Fehre conducts research into CEOs’ cognitive processes to see how these influence their decision-making and consequently impact on corporate strategy and results.