Last week I spent three beautiful days in the Kent countryside, with friends old and new.
Anne Radford organized and led the fifth edition of her annual retreat at Bore Place House, Commonwork Place, an organic farm, where you can really enjoy a nice escape from the urban routine.
The topic that attracted us is Complexity in Organizations: an exploration of our successes and lessons learned in our work helping people and organizations make sense of complexity.
The format Anne thought would fit everyone’s preference was highly interactive and, with my great pleasure, hardly reliant on anyone’s lecturing the others.
The first day we went through an interesting experience using “Essay in two voices”, in pairs writing and distilling our perspectives on complexity in organisations. We concluded with a rich group conversation.
Some of the key points, with no intention to be exhaustive or go into depth here.
Complexity is a feature of organizations. Reality is complex and organizations are too, to a great extent. Yet complex and complicated are two different concepts.
We can accept complexity with tranquility. The desire to simplify what is complex actually leads to frustration. We, as consultants and facilitators, have an opportunity in terms of supporting leaders in making sense of organizations as complex adaptive systems, instead of linear complicated systems. This understanding leads to ways of being (a leader) in the organization that make a profound difference.
The second day Nick Moore offered a session on High Reliability in Organizations with an exercise on dialogue, and collective reflections on the paradoxes we observe within the complexity of organizations. Making sense of these paradoxes proves helpful in developing highly reliable organizational environments.
Subsequently we started organizing the Open Space discussions that took place until the end of our retreat, the following day. For those of you who are not familiar, Open Space is a way to organize conversations in (even big) groups, based on parallel sessions offered by participants around different topics. The other participants take part in the conversations that attract them, in a rather informal fashion. Everyone can change group and conversation as they like. Visit the link for more details.
The attractive sessions have been many, and most of us wished to take part in all or most of them!
Topics spanned from “appreciative intelligence“, (Sarah Lewis), “elusiveness of confidence” (Lesley Moore), to “social media for multiplying opportunities in the complexity of organizations“, (myself) and many others. Each would deserve a detailed account. I will provide a summary of my session in a subsequent post.
As you look at the pictures above you may also have the sensation we had fun. Well we did!.
Many thanks to Anne Radford for organizing and leading this beautiful experience, and to all of you who were there and made it so rewarding.
SVILUPPO DELLE ORGANIZZAZIONI in LINKEDIN
