27 November 2007

Organizational Therapy and Healing

Although I can't claim the term, "organizational therapy," I can claim a unique approach to an emerging practice in organizational change and enterprise strategy. It's an approach that brings a therapeutic model to organizational healing.

Many organizations today have a sense that things are not quite right, that the constant pace of change is both wearying and not really changing anything (at least, for the better). There is a sense of general malaise in the enterprise, and the favourite spectator sport seems to be schadenfreude (or here for a more musical explanation). Organizations be experiencing tremendous trauma after org-chart re-orgs, mergers, divestitures, large-scale layoffs, or other similarly disruptive changes.

Part of the problem in getting out of the mire is how to find processes that are neither blame-shifting exercises nor superficial, rah-rah whitewashing of deeply entrenched, systemic issues. An even bigger part of the problem is that conventional management lexicons don't really have a good vocabulary of organizational dynamics that are consistent with the times in which we live. Let's face it, most informal management experience and formal management education are solidly based in Bureaucratic, Administratively controlled, Hierarchical - BAH - organizations.

That's where I come in. Using the constructs of my Valence Theory of Organization, and using engaging and energizing facilitation tools, I can help create venues of culture change (scroll down to the section on "Effecting Organizational Transformation") in organizations that will help to enable the emergence of that elusive condition of success in the contemporary world, organization-ba (here, four paragraphs from the bottom, and here, in the section on "The Nature of Leadership").

Like any good therapist, I can't solve your problems. What I can do is facilitate your organization's members to collectively understand, and collaboratively begin a process of transformation towards solving those problems. Help is close at hand.

Update (31 July 2010): Here is the how-to guide for what I do.

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