What's different?
When people say:“We’ve got to change our culture” … what do they mean?
In practice?
We believe that to improve the nature and culture of your organisation, you need to focus on how it works. As a system.
That means shifting attention away from the parts – how the people work – to the whole – how the people work together.
So, what’s different?
We focus on how people work together. The whole, not the parts.
We focus on cultivating relationships.
(Not changing behaviours.)
We see changing the way people meet, communicate and organise as a catalyst for change.
We see relationships as the secret sauce and new information as the DNA of change and the building blocks of renewal.
So…
We don’t have a pre-existing model or template or framework.
We don’t do training and development.
We don’t do team-building.
We don’t analyse and diagnose.
We don’t write reports or make recommendations.
We don’t start with the top team.
Or design change programmes to ‘roll-out’ over people.
Or try to move them from a knowable ‘here’ to a predictable ‘there’.
We don’t do these things because we don’t believe that’s how people and organisations actually work.
Or how they change.
Like all living systems they change themselves … from the inside out and the bottom up.
Whatever the context – business, the professions, industry, education, government, politics, faith based communities, NGOs – and whatever the change, we believe everything needed for change to happen is already available or accessible to the system.
It’s a question of tapping into it.
Catalysing it.
Nurturing it.
And sustaining it.
This completely changes the nature and role of leadership.
And it changes our role too.
Our job is not to design and direct change.
Our job is to design social processes that will hold and liberate the system to learn its own way into the future.
And change itself.
Testimonials
What People Say
Taking Responsibility
“Even as we left [the planning conference] and went back and got on with the job I realised that there was an invitation to me as a Host Group member to take greater responsibility for the process and to model something… to get involved. What do we need to do? What needs to be done? So I saw there was a need for taking responsibility on my part….”
Playing Our Part
“It helped us start the Chapter in a different way and because of the conversations that took place before Chapter, many of the members of the Congregation felt they had an important part to play in it. It also meant that many were starting on the same page – or a similar page! There was a shared experience, even if it had taken place in different parts of the world. …”
Growing Into It
“Much of the terminology used in our journey into systems work has grown on us a time has gone on. We have deepened our understanding of things like participative, interconnected, communication, learning as the essential dynamic and so on. These have now been accepted and we are growing in our understanding of them, and we’re creative in our ways of giving them expression…”
A Way of Living
“When I reflect back on the year of working with you, I realise that everything has changed for me… I am no longer at ease in conversations that are goal oriented and totally task driven. I get very frustrated with meetings that do not allow space for the process and leave no space for listening to one another. Working as we did last year is a way of living – a way of communication that has to be part of every day for the rest of life and all of life, and not just working for an event…”
If this lights a spark in your heart, let’s talk.
Need a process that will help people talk, think and work better together?
