Author Archive

May/04/12//Curtis Ogden//IISC:Inside

Making the Invisible Visible

I am so proud of my colleague, Gibran Rivera, for the due recognition that he has received lately in various quarters for his deep thinking and transformative work.  And I am grateful for how eloquently he captures the nature and intention of our collective work the Interaction Institute for Social Change in a recent interview:

“IISC seeks to make the invisible visible. When we are successful, people find themselves working in ways that are life-giving, generative, and unlike most of their experiences of working together.  We achieve this by paying close attention to process. Process works best when everyone knows what it is and where we are [in] it. But process is not enough. We seek to create spaces and conditions that foster connectivity at the level of authentic relationship. When we are working in authentic relationship with one another, when we learn to connect to each other in the place where our shared purpose meets, then it can feel like the work is happening all by itself. But these spaces have to be designed; they have to be held and they have to be tended to. This is where we come in. And this is how interconnectedness becomes palpable.”

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May/02/12//Curtis Ogden//Inspiration

Why Not Exhilaration?

A blog post on the Management Innovation Exchange site has got me thinking.  In a post entitled, “Forget Empowerment – Aim for Exhilaration,” Polly LaBarre profiles Ricardo Semler of Brazil’s Semco Group.  Semco is noted for its dramatic turnaround as a business, and for its unusual way of managing itself under Semler’s leadership, as noted by LaBarre -”no organizational chart, no fixed offices or working hours, no fixed CEO, no HR department, no five-year plan (or two- or one-year-plan), no job descriptions or permanent positions, no approvals necessary.”  All of this is geared towards increasing individual autonomy and agency, participation at every level, and trust.  The results are reported to be quite astounding with respect to business outcomes as well as employee fulfillment, with a long line of interested prospects at the door.  Semler himself has even freed himself up to pursue interests in the realm of helping to reform primary education and the legal system!  So how can I not help but be curious about some of what I/we might bring into our organizational life and work at IISC? Read the rest of this entry »

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Apr/26/12//Curtis Ogden//Learning Edge

Interesting vs. Useful

I’ve been enjoying David Rock’s Quiet Leadership: Six Steps to Transforming Performance at Work, a book that pulls from neuroscience literature in an attempt to help us understand ourselves better, and to create new pathways to creativity, productivity, and . . .  social change!  Rock leads with the idea that the highest point of leverage to help someone change behavior is at the level of their thinking – to help them think better for themselves.  He goes on to illustrate how what we pay attention to and how largely determines the content and quality of our lives.  This includes the way that we pay attention to problems. Read the rest of this entry »

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Apr/19/12//Curtis Ogden//Collaboration

To What End?

Another offering here in the spirit of simplicity and how we can get a lot from doing little things differently.  Yesterday I blogged about “working agreements” to set groups and collaborative efforts up for success.  Today, I want to lift up the power of planning meetings, convenings, and longer term collaborative endeavors with the end in mind.  Often we find that people have the tendency to jump into doing and talking about doing without working backwards from the intended outcomes.  There is an art and science to crafting “desired outcomes statements,” which we teach in our workshops (see Facilitative Leadership and Essential Facilitation), and a starting point is to imagine your stakeholders leaving said meeting or collaborative process and asking yourself:

  • What shared understanding is it important/imperative for us to have achieved?
  • What agreements is it important/imperative for us to have built?
  • What commitments do we want people to have made?
  • What products do we want/need to have generated?
  • What feeling/spirit do we want to carried forward out of this experience?
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Apr/18/12//Curtis Ogden//Collaboration

Working Agreements

There are times when I have to remind myself that it is the simple things that can have the biggest impact in our change work.  For example, I have been appreciating the impact of intentionally establishing what we call “working agreements” at the outset of a single convening or ongoing work with a group.  Others might refer to these as “norms” or “ground rules,” though we like placing emphasis on the fact that these are guidelines that everyone builds together, agrees to, and can amend as we discover new needs, hence “working.”  Read the rest of this entry »

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