I’ve spent most of the day preparing for a workshop that I’m facilitating for a new client tomorrow. I’ve met with the manager a few times now, but I’ve not been introduced to his team yet, so it should be an interesting day.
They’re a team that have been working on a particular piece of work for over two years that has now been successfully completed. This means a refocus for the tam on to a new and very different project that will keep them engaged for another two years. One of the keys to the workshop tomorrow will be maintaining the resilience and cohesion of what has been a very successful team, opereating in the arena that they were in, as they face a very different future. Organisational change is almost always a challenge for team-members as they deal with their own emotional barriers and a natural resistance that we all seem to have to enforced change.
I’m going to be using Theory U tomorrow to explore what is happening for the team as they leave their old world and start to explore a new one. Otto Scharmer, who devised the model, sees the value of suspending our usual unconscious downloading of past patterns and of starting to really notice what is occurring, seeing with fresh eyes what is happening for us and also what is going on around us. Once we’ve done this then we can start to think about letting go of the past. By presencing, with the source of what is within us that prompts us to think and act in the way we do, we can then start letting the emerging future come. And when we allow that future to emerge we can start to crystallise our vision and intention for what is needed and thereafter begin enacting that vision by linking our open head, our open heart and our open will in order to embody what we had intended and perform in a holistic way.
How’s that for a workshop session on change. It beats the usual Kübler-Ross change curve, hands down. I just have this nagging feeling that I might scare the life out of my audience and and may just have to throw in a lego building activity to allow them to recover.
If they do allow themselves to embrace Theory U, it might just be the start of something really special for them as a team, building a cohesion and an emerging future that will make both the team and their work together much more resilient as they move forward.
We shall see what tomorrow brings.
Silver Lobster 