Collaborating for Change: The Organization Workshop

by Barry Oshry, Tom Devane

Summary This booklet gives an overview of The Organization Workshop, a change strategy which develops the knowledge and skills of “system sight” that enable us to create partnerships up, down, and across organizational lines. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Description The Organization Workshop is a group learning session in which participants experience universal conditions, traps, and dilemmas of organizational life. By learning firsthand about these traps, along with solid theory on avoiding them, participants emerge with concepts, methods, and a common language to improve their interaction in an organization. One could say that the purpose of the Organization Workshop is to demonstrate why--despite our good intentions, well-trained people, and quality processes--our organization initiatives regularly fall short of our expectations. The reason for this depressing phenomenon is that, although we spend much of our lives in organizations and other social systems, we tend not to understand the system processes of which we are a part. The costs of this system blindness are misunderstanding and conflict within and across organizational lines, decreased motivation and initiative, the breakdown of promising partnerships, misplaced energy, poor customer service, and more. In the Organization Workshop, participants directly experience the costs of system blindness--the costs to them personally and to the organization--and they experience the organizational power as well as the personal liberation, creativity, and empowerment that come from moving from system blindness to system sight. A notable distinction of the Organization Workshop is that it puts participants into an exercise outside their daily work life. While this method doesn’t deal with changing organizational structures, planning processes, or other specific organizational issues, its power lies in another, perhaps more subtle but equally powerful realm. This method changes how people think and interact. This perspective has tremendous potential for significant, sustainable change. After a workshop, managers no longer try to manage people and events; rather, they attempt to manage conditions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Synopsis The Collaborating for Change series offers concise, comprehensive overviews of 14 leading change strategies in a convenient, inexpensive format. Adapted from chapters in The Change Handbook, each approximately 48-page booklet is written by the originator of the change strategy or an expert practitioner, and includes * An example of the strategy in action
* Tips for getting started
* An outline of roles, responsibilities, and relationships
* Conditions for success
* Keys to sustaining results
* Thought-provoking questions for discussion
If you're deciding on a change strategy for your organization and you need a short, focused treatment of several alternatives to distribute to your colleagues... Or if you've decided on a change strategy and want to disseminate information about it to get everyone on board, the Collaborating for Change booklets are the ideal choice. Other titles in the Collaborating for Change * Appreciative Inquiry
* The Conference Model
* Future Search
* Gemba Kaizen
* Open Space Technology
* The Organization Workshop
* Participative Design Workshop
* Preferred Futuring
* Real Time Strategic Change
* The Search Conference
* The Strategic Forum
* The Think Like a Genius Process
* Whole-Scale Change
* Whole Systems Approach

38 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1999