|
......................................................................... Monday, October 13, 2008 .........................................................................
Introduction to Organizational Learning (MF1) Based on The Fifth Discipline, the workshop offers you an experiential immersion into understanding and using the principles, concepts, methods and tools of Organizational Learning. You will become familiar with tools and methods for:.
Some areas of focus include:
Through a combination of lectures, demonstrations and hands-on practice, this workshop provides a valuable foundation to people who have a curiosity and interest, but limited working knowledge of Organizational Learning. .........................................................................
Creating New Growth from Within: Enabling Disruptive Innovation to Succeed (MF2) Organic growth depends on innovation. Creating organic growth, especially in mature organizations, requires looking beyond process and examining the cultural and leadership land-mines waiting to derail new growth ideas. In this one-day workshop, you will gain an understanding of the personal and organizational reframing that nurtures ideas and enables new growth business to emerge. You will explore the cultural attributes, structural designs and leadership behaviors necessary to succeed at such organic growth. Through a combination of interactive lecture, group exercises and case studies, you will gain a deep appreciation for:
Target audience
.........................................................................
Enhance Your Meetings Using Conversational Leadership: Getting Those 60 Minutes of Your Life Back(MF3) If you are interested in developing and integrating principles of Conversational Leadership to turn routine meetings into collaborative conversations, then come to this session and be prepared to learn, discuss, practice, and have fun! This full-day session shares the practices of Conversational Leadership, a model rooted in the belief that learning is social and occurs naturally through conversation. The theories and techniques of Conversational Leadership underscore the interdependency of organizations, no matter how complex, and provide a model that helps organizations learn and grow by sharing knowledge and responsibility and cultivating creativity. TIn this context, routine meetings take on a new meaning in your work as a leader. Meetings are no longer dull, unproductive time wasters. We will show you how they can be an essential means to foster common understanding around the purpose of your organization, align people around your organization's vision, and engage them in the deeper meaning of what you collectively want to accomplish. In this session, you will learn how to design and facilitate meetings using Conversational Leadership, how to establish a safe space for important conversations, and how to ensure accountability in the system. This session will consist of a series of learning sessions that are dynamic and interactive; 80% of this workshop will be driven by your participation, with the remaining time stewarded by the facilitators. .........................................................................
Collaboration in the Workplace: Challenging our Mental Models to Embrace a Broader Perspective(MA1) This session is an engaging opportunity to build self-awareness of mental models that can limit your ability to effectively communicate and collaborate with others. By better understanding what drives your perceptions, you will learn how to move beyond obstacles that prevent you from achieving your goals and identify new strategies to gain better results. You will also learn from research how goals, when set with the right intentions, can support progress, relationships, mental health, and performance. You will benefit from training that is currently being employed by top leaders at such organizations as Shell Oil, NASA and Sandia National Laboratories and applied research from the University of Michigan. As a result of attending, you will:
This session will be lively and fun, combining research presentation with concrete and practical exercises. It is appropriate for all skill levels, from beginner to advanced, no background experience or terminology needed, all that is required is a desire to learn! .........................................................................
Leaving a Legacy: Social and Environmental Responsibility, A Task for Corporations and Individuals (MP1) This experiential workshop will address the hot topic of corporations’ social and environmental responsibility, and the impact each individual can have on that complex task. Participants will build a map of the systemic connections at play when talking social and environmental responsibility, and identify the “low hanging fruit”, opportunities they personally have to influence their corporate legacy. At the same time, this workshop will be about organizational learning tools. The way the session is designed will follow the Action Reflection Learning (ARL) methodology, so that the participants will have an experiential learning at two levels: At the level of the content, by working on Leaving a Legacy, and on the process level, learning some ARL organizational learning tools and processes they can replicate in other contexts. At the end of the workshop the participants will have developed a map of systemic connections within the corporate social and environmental responsibility
.........................................................................
Sustaining Employees: Workplace Respect and Engagement (TF1) This workshop will help participants explore ways to create positive workplaces that will sustain employees and improve business results. Expect to work during this session. You will practice and see modeled inquiry and reflective practices. You will experience how organizations can use interviews and group discussions to identify positive workplace behaviors that you can use to impact your organizations. You will discover how seemingly simple actions can make a difference. Central to the workshop will be an exploration of questions, and how their careful framing them helps to stimulate actions to improve the workplace. As a participant in this workshop you will:
Participants who are on the front lines and who lead and support those on the front lines will benefit. Researchers (e.g. in academic settings or foundations) who are interested in co-creating projects with practitioners are also encouraged to attend. The workshop builds on a five-year collaborative action research project in the US Department of Veterans Affairs and is an example of how participation in SoL Greenhouses moved a project forward. .........................................................................
Coming Into Your Own: Women’s Life Cycles, Leadership Archetypes and Change(TF2) This session is a personal development program for women who are interested in engaging in a process of reflection and growth and in understanding and expressing themselves more fully, and in learning a tool for gaining insight into what is emerging for them. Session objectives:
Topics/processes:
The concepts and practices can be used to build personal mastery and team collaboration and learning. The design, experimental and research phases of the longer versions of this program were funded by the Fetzer Institute and the remarkable results in the participants’ lives have been tracked over five years. Organizations that have sent participants include Hewlett-Packard, BP, the World Bank, United Way, Shell, Intel, Boeing, and the University of Michigan. This program is run in the U.S., South Africa and the UK. .........................................................................
Leading With Integrity(TA1) This workshop focuses on the relationship between leadership, values, and integrity. Our values are embedded in our actions and not always conscious. Becoming more conscious of how we demonstrate our values as we lead is an important tool to strengthen leadership skills. Integrity—consistency of values in everyday action—is not something extra; it is an essential element of effective leadership. This highly interactive, experiential workshop incorporates common coaching tools, peer interaction and feedback to help participants gain deeper understanding of their own perspectives on leadership, values and integrity. As a participant you will gain:
Remember, leadership takes place at all levels in any organization. This workshop will help leaders at any level develop frameworks and strategies that increase competence in decision-making while they strengthen the confidence of followers in carrying out those decisions, even in the midst of ambiguous conditions and competing priorities. .........................................................................
Vital Differences – An Approach for Exploring and Using Individual Differences (TA2) While each of us is unique, there are patterns in how we think, feel, and behave in relation to our external environment. These patterns relate to our internal way of functioning which is sometimes similar, and sometimes radically dissimilar, to those around us. These individual differences, often unseen and unacknowledged, are a major source of confusion and misunderstanding in our relationships. This session sharpens your ability to sense differences clearly and objectively and, provides a way of exploring diverse perspectives and needs for structure, engagement, and meaning. The Vital Differences approach represents a convergence of three factors: the focus on internal processing patterns, the process of self-exploration which builds capacity for awareness and bridging differences, and the grounding of the information in everyday situations. These factors make the approach easy to understand and use without needing a test or to learn a new model of human characteristics. The session offers participants:
Target audience: Anyone working with diversity, team interaction, leadership coaching, and other areas where improved communication and relationships are critical – particularly in situations where you need to move quickly, yet want to use all the human capacities available. This workshop is prerequisite for “Vital Differences – Building Collaborative Partnerships”, but can be taken separately. .........................................................................
The Application of Systems Thinking and Value Network Anlaysis to Meet Unprecedented Business Challenges of Boeing Commercial Airplane’s Flight Operation, Test & Validation Organization (TP1) .........................................................................
Intentional Inquiry: Collaborative Learning to Enhance Organizational Performance (TP2) In this session you will learn a collaborative inquiry approach to working with organizational challenges that will help you explore assumptions, more fully understand the complexity of a situation, and support individuals and teams in taking effective action. By the workshop’s end you will:
The session, which features a description of the inquiry process, its uses and benefits, an opportunity to practice, and insights from a leader, is geared for people of all levels who want to learn collaborative approaches to solving complex problems. Organizational and team leaders will find this a great resource for engaging people in new ways to support building a collaborative culture. Target audience: HR/OD/T&D professionals, line managers, consultants, coaches, students. Since this session is based on the assumption that every individual is already leaving a legacy, a daily footprint, and that we all can learn a new organizational learning tool, it is designed in an inclusive way, not making distinctions nor setting specific requisites to participate. .........................................................................
Practices of Presencing: Skills for Creating and Sustaining Learning Communities (WF1) Participants will learn how to participate in and lead a learning community. The session will be an experience of community, with time to reflect on specific strategies participants can translate to their workplaces immediately, and sustain through time. Take-aways will include methods for replicating learning community practices for knowledge sharing, collaboration, and innovation. The objective of this session is to involve participants in a learning community that engages the paradox recounted by physicist John Polkinghorne: There's a very interesting scientific insight which says that regions where really new things happen are always regions at the edge of chaos. They are regions where cloudiness and clearness, order and disorder, interlace each other. If you're too much on the orderly side of that borderline, everything is so rigid that nothing really new happens. You just get rearrangements. If you're too far on the haphazard side, nothing persists, everything just falls apart. It's these ambiguous areas, where order and disorder interlace, where really new things happen, where the action is, if you like. (Conversation with Krista Tippett, May, 2008, American Public Media) We will learn to create regions where really new things happen and where those things persist. Methods will include shared experiences of context-setting, story-telling, reflection, discussion, writing, Q&A. Target audience: Project managers, leaders, practitioners, anyone involved in collaboration or innovation .........................................................................
Leadership Agility (WF2) According to Boeing CEO Jim McNerney, “The ability to be agile enough is the gut issue in leading an organization today.” In this workshop, based on the research underlying the award-winning book, Leadership Agility, co-author Bill Joiner will guide you in applying practices used by highly agile leaders to your own organizational change project. In this highly interactive workshop, you will:
This is a “roll up your sleeves” workshop that uses a new tool called the Leadership Agility Compass, along with a workbook and peer coaching that will help you apply leadership agility principles and practices to a real-life change project of your choice. Target audience: It is for executives and managers with responsibility for more than one level of employees, for individual contributors responsible for effecting organizational change on any scale, and for leadership development professionals. Come with a (large or small) organizational change effort that you are beginning or have recently begun. .........................................................................
Systemic Change During Times of Uncertainty (WF3) In today’s business environment success hinges on organizational flexibility, resilience and adaptive responsiveness – all aspects of systemic change. This highly interactive, experiential workshop begins by addressing the 5-types of Situational Conversations that organizations need to have in order to navigate during times of uncertainty and turbulence. Using these, a system of transformational change is introduced which explores: external and internal change cycles, organizational learning, and the three typical ways that change efforts fail. Lastly, strategic conversations and organizational change are applied to goal-setting and the creation of future market scenarios. This workshop provides participants with:
This workshop brings together the conversations, commitments, and change cycles that lie at the heart of every organization. By appealing to all levels of the organization, from leaders to staff, the workshop integrates different points of view and organizational experiences to holistically view the systems of thinking and change that produce business sustainability. Wednesday, October 15, 8:30.........................................................................
Vital Differences – An Approach for Exploring and Using Individual Differences (WA1) THIS IS A REPEAT OF SESSION TA2 While each of us is unique, there are patterns in how we think, feel, and behave in relation to our external environment. These patterns relate to our internal way of functioning which is sometimes similar, and sometimes radically dissimilar, to those around us. These individual differences, often unseen and unacknowledged, are a major source of confusion and misunderstanding in our relationships. This session sharpens your ability to sense differences clearly and objectively and, provides a way of exploring diverse perspectives and needs for structure, engagement, and meaning. The Vital Differences approach represents a convergence of three factors: the focus on internal processing patterns, the process of self-exploration which builds capacity for awareness and bridging differences, and the grounding of the information in everyday situations. These factors make the approach easy to understand and use without needing a test or to learn a new model of human characteristics. The session offers participants:
Target audience: Anyone working with diversity, team interaction, leadership coaching, and other areas where improved communication and relationships are critical – particularly in situations where you need to move quickly, yet want to use all the human capacities available. This workshop is prerequisite for “Vital Differences – Building Collaborative Partnerships”, but can be taken separately. .........................................................................
Leadership as Energy - An Exploration of Where Energy Comes From and the Leadership Principles at Work (WA2) Join us in exploring how to recognize and unleash the natural energy in people and organizations; and what leaders can do to nurture, focus and sustain it. This module will provide participants an opportunity to consider habitual ways of thinking (e.g., mental models) about Leadership and Change, and to learn how to tap into the power that comes from working with their own natural energy and that of their organizations. We will also explore interventions to build capacity and readiness in organizations undergoing change. By the end of the workshop participants will:
The session features mini-lectures, discussion, small group reflections and experiential exercises. There are no prerequisites. However, it will be helpful for participants to have pre-identified a situation or initiative for use in the exercises. Target audience: In addition to leaders, this is also very relevant for staff or line managers, and individual contributors who are trying to introduce, expand or sustain learning organization/strategic initiatives where sponsorship is emerging or changing, and timeframes dictate new decision points. .........................................................................
Vital Differences – Building Collaborative Partnerships (WP1) The complexity of organizational life requires interaction with others to produce innovative and effective results. This workshop provides ways to explore and work effectively with the differences that exist between you and others so that you can bring more vitality to your relationships and allow the fullness of each one’s contribution to emerge and be sustained. This experiential session builds on the initial workshop, your capacity for partnerships based on collaboration, rather than simply cooperation. You will explore commonalities, distinctions, and capacities that exist within the relationship or team, and gain insight into how your individual pattern of processing may, or may not, align with group or organizational patterns. From these insights, you can create strategies and actions for more resilient and satisfying relationships. The workshop offers participants:
Target audience: Anyone working in a collaborative partnership or team where effective interactions are essential to produce results or have a positive relationship – and where individuals are interested in applications to their work or personal situation that can be immediately applied. The basic workshop – “Vital Differences – An Approach for Exploring and Using Individual Differences” is a prerequisite for this session. .........................................................................
Leading Through Listening: Inquiring Into Behavioral Patterns Blocking an Organizations’ Ability to Learn and Change (WP2) The purpose of this workshop is to extend the exploration begun in our first module “Leadership as Energy,” by examining several self-defeating communication patterns in organizations, what leaders/teams can do to arrive at new and shared understandings of the patterns, and how to improve them. Please note that while preferable, it is not mandatory to have attended the first module (Leadership as Energy - Wed afternoon) to be able to participate fully in this one. Participants will learn how to work with the patterns as they play out at multiple levels in the organization: individual, teams, senior leaders, and systemic. A fundamental question underlying our ability to shift the patterns is: “When we are “stuck” or in crisis, to what degree are we “in-learning,” “in-wanting,” or “in-knowing?” By the end of the workshop participants will:
There are no pre-requisites. Participants are asked to have a current business issue with which they can work. We will use a methodology we developed with Dr. Donald A. Schon, in conjunction with mini-lectures, case studies, and discussion groups Target audience: The workshop is designed for line leaders and practitioners who want to effect change in an organization and to deepen/improve the experience of connection and communication across diverse groups. .........................................................................
Seeing and Using the Big Picture: Structural Dynamics (RF1) Structural Dynamics is an organizational learning tool that combines the thoroughness of causal analysis with the creativity of scenario learning. In this workshop, participants will learn to consider a broad range of possible external conditions in which their organizations will be operating in the future and how to develop robust strategies to shape their future. Highly interactive, this workshop explores Structural Dynamics through a range of small group exercises. Steps in the Structural Dynamics Process:
Participants will:
Two prerequisites for this workshop are curiosity and a desire to collaborate with others in seriously exploring future possibilities. Familiarity with causal loop diagramming is helpful but not required. .........................................................................
Reflections on Social Systems - Illuminating the Path of Well-Being (RF2) When we reflect on how creativity, performance and well being are created we find that social collaboration is the basis of all human progress. These social networks aren’t the teams we imagine nor the departments we envision on an organizational chart. The purpose of this session is to share our understanding of the nature of collaboration and how collaboration is the basis of performance and well being. The session objectives include:
.........................................................................
Leading Systemic Change (RF3) The purpose of this workshop is to enable participants to develop and integrate the skills of change management and systems thinking. It is based on extensive experience that:
Objectives for the session include:
Topics to be covered:
The session is designed to maximize hands-on application. Participants will have opportunity to identify a change problem that they would like to work on during the session and apply many of the tools and frameworks presented. They will also benefit from feedback from colleagues as well as the facilitators. Target audience: Change agents who want to increase their effectiveness and people familiar with systems thinking who want to improve their ability to apply it in organizations. Prerequisites Visit the Applied Systems Thinking web site and read the article Leveraging Change: The Power of Systems Thinking in Action http://www.appliedsystemsthinking.com/res_levchange.html .........................................................................
Fundamentals of Insight Thinking (RF4) In this session you will learn the principles that govern insight, how to work with them to access your best thinking, and how to connect with your own source of wisdom and good judgment. By workshop’s end:
Upon your return to “real life”:
The session, which features lectures, demonstrations, exercises and supervised practice, is geared for executives and senior managers who influence many people. It is also useful for individual contributors. If consultants wish to attend, we recommend you bring a client. .........................................................................
Leveraging Organizational Learning Tools to Create Exceptional Customer Experiences That Deliver Results (RP1) Companies can no longer successfully compete only on price or survive in commodity markets over the long term. This workshop leverages Organizational Learning tools and methodologies to provide new insights into how companies can align their organization and motivate employees around the design and delivery of exceptional customer experiences; resulting in significant market differentiation and value to the bottom line This course will be structured around presentation and interactive class exercises that:
Target audience:
Two prerequisites for this workshop are curiosity and a desire to collaborate with others in seriously exploring future possibilities. Familiarity with causal loop diagramming is helpful but not required. .........................................................................
Putting It All Together – Integrating Our Learning as Practice – World Cafe (FA1) This workshop will offer participants the opportunity to share and ground their learning experiences from the week in an interactive world café type setting. This facilitated session will be run in a conversational small group and plenary format to offer a high degree of engagement with others and the content from the week. It will also offer the host organizations and participants the chance to generate information and questions that can be incorporated into the knowledge base of organization learning that exists within the SoL Community. This forum will provide the ability to interact with others and build upon the shared sense of community which is one of the foundations of SoL. The target audience will be anyone who participated in the sessions during the week that would like to consider how to put concepts into practice. It can also be beneficial for an individual who wants to engage in a learning experience that provides an overview of the weeks content through the eyes of others. The basic workshop – “Vital Differences – An Approach for Exploring and Using Individual Differences” is a prerequisite for this session. .........................................................................
|