Leadership – A Systems View

“An extraordinary insight into what it feels like at every level of the organisation as well as experiencing your own strength and weaknesses.”

Dr Peter Devlin, Clinical Director, Care Unbound Ltd, Brighton, UK

 

This high-impact, experiential workshop centred on the highly acclaimed work of Barry Oshry, addresses four key questions:

1. How can you generate greater partnership and engagement across your organisation?
2. How can you create a more empowered, collaborative and innovative work culture?
3. What difference would it make to act systemically: seeing how context and ‘structures’ drive behaviour?
4. Which practices can deepen your insight, cultivate your compassion and enhance your effectiveness?

The “Organisation Workshop” provides a rich introduction to the systems leadership approach of Barry Oshry and how to create the conditions for productive, powerful and engaged working relationships in teams and whole organisations. Through an engaging and visceral organisational simulation we illuminate the default behaviours that limit team and organisational effectiveness and introduce Oshry’s distinctive approach to creating empowered organisations, ones that are capable of surviving and thriving in turbulent and complex environments.

What can you expect?

• High impact, experiential learning
• Practice of mindfulness skills relevant to leadership
• Simple, strategic frameworks that offer deeper insight and wiser action strategies
• Time for reflection to relate the learnings to your unique circumstances.

The centrepiece of the day is an organisational exercise where participants enter a fast-moving, turbulent environment as either a top executive, middle manager, worker or customer.  The experience closely mirrors day-to-day organisational life so that there’s no backing away from the impact that your behaviour has on others and the organisation’s performance.

Benefits of attending?

• Gain a whole system view of the organisation.
• Strengthen your capacity to create resilient partnerships: up, down and across organisational boundaries.
• Address the root causes, not just the symptoms of misunderstandings, communication problems and conflict.
• Understand more and blame less.
• Bring a deeper wisdom, compassion and effectiveness to your life and work.
• Produce better results for yourself, your organisation and all your stakeholders.

The methodology behind our workshop

Barry Oshry, a North American systems theorist, has worked for over 45 years with a single-minded quest to unlock the mysteries of power and powerlessness in social systems.  Through decades of research, Oshry made a simple observation. In organisation after organisation, regardless of the industry, size or country, he witnessed the same self-limiting patterns of behaviour.  Each time the problems were thought to be unique and personal. And the solution:to shuffle, fire or change the players.  The only problem was, the same issues kept coming back. What Oshry realised was that the vast majority of problems were not, in fact, personal. Instead, they were systemic – meaning shaped by the different contexts within which people operate and work relative to one another. And that the path to leadership lay not in changing the players but in working the underlying systemic issues in ways that produce lasting results.

Workshop Leaders

John Watters is an Associate of Future Considerations, Founding Director of Living Leadership and Senior Associate of Power+Systems. John is the leading authority on Barry Oshry’s systems leadership work in Europe and has worked in close partnership with Barry Oshry for 20 years. John specialises in creating the conditions that enable productive, empowered and purposeful working relationships. He has a reputation for facilitating breakthroughs in situations that seem stuck.

 

Beth mAcdonald is a Director of Future Considerations and is an accredited trainer in Barry Oshry’s frameworks. Beth’s lifelong focus has been on unleashing the creative potential of people and organisations. She worked as a technical leader in fast moving consumer goods and textiles for 25 years shifting in 2004 into the world of facilitation and coaching. She works in Asia and globally serving as a senior team coach and leadership faculty for regional and global companies.

Read a participant’s review of a previous workshop here.

 What People Say

“It’s easy to underestimate the power of Oshry work until you have taken this workshop. You will find instant applications to both your personal and professional life.”
Seema Malhotra, MP for Feltham and Weston

“The workshop was the most successful and impactful group training I have been involved in for 25 years. It’s changed how I see my leadership role.” 
Peter Thomas, Senior Fellow, Institute for Government

Feel free to talk to either Beth mAcdonald or John Watters if you would like to discuss about how we use this workshop, and other parts of Oshry’s framework, as a face-to face and online element of our leadership development programmes and as a catalyst to disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions and shift mindsets in senior team off-sites leadership conferences and multi-stakeholder events.

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