WORKSHOPS & PROGRAMS
Throughout the week trainers will be conducting high-impact events developed by Barry Oshry for groups in their local communities. Most trainers will be conducting the Organization Workshop on Creating Partnership, others will be conducting the When Cultures Meet Workshop, and others will be making presentations and leading conversations focusing on partnership.
The Organization Workshop
Organizations, despite having worthy missions and committed and talented people, regularly fall into painful, dysfunctional patterns – strained relationships, misunderstandings, lost opportunities, and diminished effectiveness. For hundreds of organizations across the globe the Organization Workshop regularly:
- demonstrates how, despite people’s best intentions, these dysfunctional patterns keep occurring, and why the usual solutions don’t work
- provides concrete and practical strategies for creating and sustaining satisfying, creative, and productive partnerships among all stakeholders, and it produces lasting results.
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The When Cultures Meet Workshop
Bringing together diverse cultures, and capitalizing on the various gifts each brings, is the key to creating healthy, durable human organizations and communities. Yet the meeting of diverse cultures too often results in destructive conflicts, unresolved issues, the suppression of one culture by another, WE versus THEM attitudes, wasted energies, and lost possibilities.
WCM clarifies the deep emotional issues that come into play as cultures meet, the challenges faced by all parties. WCM offers no simplified answers to these challenging processes, but it does provide a deep emotional understanding of the personal challenges involved and a framework for creating robust human systems that capitalize on the unique capabilities and contributions of its diverse partners.
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Presentation and Book Discussion Groups
Trainer-led presentations and conversations focusing on subjects related to creating partnership, including:
- Why There are No Top Teams. This session focuses on the difficulty of creating and sustaining partnership among Tops – whether they are corporate executive, business partners, or couples.
- Power In The Middle. This session focuses on the unique dilemmas faced by organizational “Middles,” people who are regularly caught between the conflicting needs, demands, and pressures coming at them from above, below, and sideways. It also demonstrates concrete strategies by which Middles, individually and collectively, can become a uniquely contributory force in the organization and community.
- From System Blindness to System Sight. Although we are arguably among the most social of all creatures – members of families, communities, teams, organizations, voluntary agencies, faith groups – we tend to be blind to the systems of which we are a part. We fail to see how those systems shape our experiences of ourselves and others. System blindness is costly: broken relationships, unnecessary stress, destructive conflict, lost opportunities, diminished effectiveness, and, in the extreme, bigotry and oppression.
Reading groups. Discussion groups based on:
- Seeing Systems: Unlocking the Mysteries of Organizational Life, (2nd edition), Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco
- In the Middle, Power and Systems, Boston.
