What
is Organisation Development Consultancy?
We believe that organisations are primarily
social systems - groups of people in relation and connection
to one another who have come together to achieve something.
Our role as organisation development
(OD) consultants is to help people understand their
systems and work out how to align them better with
the organisation’s
purpose. This literally makes an organisation more
purposeful – and more enjoyable – and always
involves change.
Traditional management development
uses a classroom format to learn and build new skills.
By contrast, we work alongside teams as their guides
and partners as they wrestle with ‘live’ issues.
We help leaders and team members get
behind evident stress points and ‘problems’ to their underlying
causes. These are often about the way the larger system – people,
processes, cultural expectations, history etc – has
evolved and operates.
We believe that the answers lie
with the organisation rather than with us and so our
role is to design an approach which helps leaders and
team members identify and strengthen helpful behaviours
and create new links across the system. The first stage,
then, is inquiry – a
broad-reaching discovery process into ‘the way
things are around here’.
We involve as many people
as possible to gives clues into how the system works
and people’s readiness for change. We then facilitate
the process of identifying and amplifying what works
well (and in the interests of the system) – this
is always more powerful than trying to define ‘what’s
wrong’ and attempting to fix it.
We
would like to share an example of some work we have
been doing with a client over the past 18 months
which illustrates the range and breadth of approach,
and what can be achieved. Click
here to view »
The case study shows that Organisation
Development is not just about big projects that radically
transform organisations. Sometimes it is a series of
smaller, connected activities that build trust between
the consultant and the people within the organisation.
We believe that when an organisation
starts to see its own systems and patterns it can start
to take responsibility for its own change and act with
greater choice: part of our role is to help organisations
build internal capacity to sustain the change process.
If you would
like to come and talk to us about the issues you are
facing in your organisation, we’d
be delighted to talk to you.
The Organisation
Workshop – Seeing Systems
Are you interested to understand
a bit more about how social systems impact our behaviour? American
systems thinker, educator and author of Seeing Systems,
Barry Oshry, believes that we are all either Top,
Middle, Bottom or Customer in our interactions with
people.
Top, Middle, Bottom, and Customer are
conditions all of us face at whatever level we occupy
and in whatever function we perform in the organisation.
We
are Top whenever we have overall responsibility for
some segment of the organisation or some organisational
function, whether as CEO, division head, project manager,
team leader, classroom instructor and so on.
We are
Bottom whenever others control the resources we need
in order to move our projects or initiatives ahead. (Even
CEOs know what it is to be bottom!)
We are Middle whenever
we attempt to function between the conflicting needs,
demands, and priorities of others.
We are Customer whenever
we look to some other person or group to provide us
with the product or service we need in order to move
our initiative ahead.
We are constantly moving in and
out of Top, Middle, Bottom, and Customer conditions.
In order to provide an environment to examine what
it feels like to be in the roles of Top, Middle, Bottom
and Customer Barry Oshry designed and developed the
Organisation Workshop.
Organisation Workshops have
been used by some of the top companies in the world
over the past 30 years. Famously,
Microsoft ran Organisation Workshops throughout the
business twenty years ago and transformed the way they
did business.
The Organisation Workshop is both
a seminar and a simulation exercise. It is educative,
highly experiential and absolutely real and relevant
to what’s happening
in organisations. It helps participants ‘see’ some
of the characteristics embedded in the various positions
we inhabit in organisational life – to ‘see
systems’ in operation.
It is a great way to see how the
stresses and strains of organisational life have
their basis in the structure of the system – and
the demands that structure places upon us all.
Once we can see what is going on, we are able to find
new solutions to old difficulties and create better
understanding of how to relate to one another in our
various positions.
 CW Associates Jane Speller and
Hilary Rowland have recently become two of the very
few people in the UK accredited to run the Organisation
Workshop (OW).
We
would like to invite you to our very first one day
Consultancy Works Organisation Workshop to be held
on 23rd September 2008 in Sheffield, South Yorkshire – details
elsewhere in this Newsletter.
Power + Systems, Inc.
http://www.powerandsystems.com
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