Building Embodied Knowledge for Effective Action
Building Embodied Knowledge for Effective Action
Fundamentals of Systems Thinking and Practice
Diagnosis and Design for Process Improvement
Realigning Culture, Values, and Behavior
We are convinced that much of the knowledge you'll need to build and maintain organizational learning and growth is already in use in your organization. This is true where ever individuals and groups are acting effectively. We say this because we define knowledge as the ability to move into action to produce a desirable outcome. To help build knowledge in action, or embodied knowledge, we promise that our training programs will enable you and your people to move in new ways, use new tools, and craft new conversation for action and accountability.
Our training programs are highly experiential, geared to help individuals and teams focus, clarify and expand the usefulness of systems, problem-solving, and continuous improvement tools through group exercises. Additionally, we emphasize action-based learning in the conversational skills of speaking and listening for action and accountability.
Our training programs always reflect the value that participants have free and informed consent to the objectives and methods we use. Where we are asked to coach individuals intent on learning new skills, we act always to preserve dignity while facilitating learning.
all of our training programs can be easily customized for your organization's needs. Programs may be conducted on or off site.
At the core of our work lies the discipline of systems thinking and practice for organizational learning, change, and continuous improvement. The following training programs are available:
Half-Day Mini-Seminars
One-Day Seminars
Three-Day Seminar: Systems Practices for Organizational Learning
Four-Day Seminar: Designing a Systemic Change Initiative
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When faced with a problem, why do we often do the same things expecting different results? Actually, psychologists and neuroscientists tell us there are good reasons for this. Yet, we would probably rather get the results we desire when we act on a problem. This means achieving or maintaining the purpose that seems threatened by the problem that has got our attention. Moreover, achieving our purpose assumes that we know clearly what it is. Yet often we don't.
Systemic problem-solving provides a theory-based discipline, in the form of a sequence of flexible though systematic steps, for understanding and managing complex problems. The following programs are available:
Series of Three Half-Day Mini-Seminars: Systemic Problem-Solving
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Work processes tend to be most effective when the people in them are continuously acting to adapt their processes to changing customer and organizational needs. In order to enhance the effectiveness of this continuous diagnosis and design work, we provide team-members with a common set of diagnosis and design tools, drawn from the fields of Quality and Continuous Improvement and Systemic Process Design.
Key practices include process-mapping and gap analysis, system structural analysis using "causal loop mapping," and implementation of new designs.
An expected outcome for teams in this training is that they will act more collaboratively with their colleagues in up and down stream process, and that they will run more effective and efficient processes. The following program is available:
Two-day Seminar: Diagnosis and Design for Process Improvement
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Organizational culture, values, and behavior are among the most powerful, and ambiguous, forces within an organization. Yet, they are also often the least understood. We may think about the culture when we are proud to be part of such a unique band of people. Alternately, we may complain that our culture, and the thinking it condones, my inhibit us from reaching the heights of which we are capable.
Sometimes we notice that people in organizations act in ways that can inhibit learning. Sometimes these acts take the form of distortions or cover-ups of information that, should it get out, could prove embarrassing to the actors. The defensive cover-up, if clever enough, can forstall the embarrassment, but it has a pernicious side-effect: the cover-up ensures that the conditions which produced the error in the first place will not be examined. So the error can be made over and over. This cycle describes an organizational defensive pattern (see the work of Chris Argyris) that can powerfully inhibit learning.
Training in understanding organizational defensive patterns enables members to diagnose and diagram the structural feedback loops that constitute an organizational defensive pattern. But, while necessary for moving toward redesigning those patterns, such conceptual training is radically insufficient. What more is needed, should an organization wish to design new patterns of thinking and action within its culture, is a program of custom periodic intervention.
The following training is aimed at clarifying the relationships between culture, values, and behavior in a way that enables participants to recognize patterns of values, thinking, and action that may inhibit organizational learning. Additionally, key tools for enhancing communication skills are included in this program:
One-Day Seminar: Systems Thinking for Understanding Organizational Defensiveness
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Why is it that we often lose the use of our leadership skills when we need them the most: in situations of sudden stress and uncertainty. Here is a set of training options in the inner art of leadership, offering decision-makers an opportunity to begin where they have the most leverage, within themselves.
This training program offers participants an increased ability to use the body's natural balance to project a strong yet disarming leadership presence. It enables leaders to move more decisively and effectively to help manage and resolve conflicts, and helps them to listen better to the needs of others while not losing touch with their own.
Through a combination of open-space dialogue and expertly facilitated action learning modules, participants begin to develop practical skills for dealing with verbal aggression while neither escalating it nor giving in to it. Non-strenuous, paired movements based on aikido principles such as "stepping off the line of attack," "blending with an adversary," "cutting," and "remaining connected," are explored. Physical learning based on these principles is translated in dialogue and group casework sessions to the application of communication skills in casework roleplays, in order to help participants put ideas and insights to work in their daily lives.
Participants enrolled in this program as a continuing course find over time that they begin to feel less threatened by others, more at ease and balanced in their bodies, and more in touch with the voice of their intuition. From the perspective of others, these leaders are more likely to earn trust in demanding situations.
While this program is based on principles from the martial art of aikido, it is designed for all people regardless of their state of physical fitness. It requires no previous experience in martial arts.
One-Day Seminar: The Aikido of Leadership
Continuing coaching as needed
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Other Training Options
Adaptive Learning Design can also accommodate other, more informal styles for establishing conversations about systems thinking and organizational learning. For example, we can join a group for an informal "brown bag" lunch presentation, or some other gathering convenient for a particular organization.
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Contact: phone 707-762-1460, or email: dooley@well.com
For more about systems thinking and practice click on the "systems" page in the links at the bottom of the menu bar to the left.
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