Organisational resilience workshop

 

Available in-house

 

 

 

 

 

There are organisations that know how to shift rapidly, to change, and to learn.  They seize opportunities.  They stabilise quickly or recover their position in rough waters.  We refer to this dimension as resilience or agility.

 

Yet some managers, consultants and facilitators we talk with are frustrated by how slowly some organisations or projects can move.  They talk about resistance slowing down change efforts, sometimes when speed is most required.  They say that surprises happen too frequently.  Opportunities are overlooked and deadlines are too often missed.  Alerts are fumbled and emerging patterns ignored.  Learning opportunities are too often mishandled.

 

There are skills and attitudes and processes that can help develop foresight, agility and resilience.  We are therefore offering a workshop where these can be learned: where they can be combined with participantsÕ own insights and experience, and applied to developing resilience in their own workplaces or with their own clients.

 

The program is a two-day working meeting.  Participants will work at the edge of their thinking and experience on real business issues and resilience in their workplace.  The program is an action-learning opportunity with a range of other managers and consultants.  Attendees will work in small teams, and for short inputs or discussion in the large group.

 

Typical business issues that participants will bring with them are:

 

á          A project to build a longer term agility and survivability into the business

á          Learning to recognise business opportunities and innovate to capitalise on them

á          Changing the approach on one project to use it as an exemplar for other projects

á          Mobilising a business division or unit to lift its performance, either in a dynamic work environment or in tough market conditions

á          A project that needs to be tackled with more urgency or recovered from dire straits

á          Recovering the business when it has missed key alert signals about changes in its own capability or in its competitive market conditions.

 

Given the nature of the meeting, participants will make their own decisions about the identity of their business or organisation and the level of disclosure they engage in.

 

In joining these 2 days, participants will:

 

á          Bring their own challenges or issues and their reading material or links

á          Work with other attendees to explore real business issues with a mix of mental models and tools for improving resilience

á          Confront the means for fostering agile and resilient workplaces

á          Develop alternative frameworks for making sense of their workplace and context

á          Develop alternative strategies about agility to test or pilot in their workplace

á          Acquire a suite of tools likely to assist them to work with complex or moribund projects or business units

á          Acquire a network of contacts working with and learning about resilient  workplaces

á          Receive documentation to help them do all of this.

 

The 2 day program has four elements:

 

á          the first session manages introductions, core principles for fostering or recovering agile organisations and in small groups, introduces the short stories participants bring about their business issues and opportunities

á          the next session has participants expressing their own principles and developing workable ways of seeing and acting in the workplaces they select for discovery work from the stories people share; they also test their proposals with other groups in a robust assessment process

á          there will be short periods for questions, inputs and issues, interspersed with the application of accumulated ideas to a new issue from each group; again these proposals for increasing resilience or recovering agility will be tested and modified by attendees

á          the final session each day accommodates a public conversation, integrates insights and proposals, new mental models and the materials offered by the meeting leaders; pairs will then work through the transfer of their learning to their workplaces and determine whether or not there are buddying opportunities they will make use of.

 

Your facilitators are Bob Dick and Brian Donaldson.  Bob undertakes a wide range of projects and facilitated events in the business, executive work team and community spaces.  He is well-read in resilience, agility, complexity and action learning.  Brian brings a broad range of experience in project agility and business unit resilience from conception through to implementation.  This experience has typically been in the business and GOC spaces, where less-structured methods and innovation are essential to increasing likely success.  Both Brian and Bob facilitate activities that produce practical and actionable outcomes.