Prep Work for Wise OrgS
Thank you and congratulations on registering for the Wise Organizations? Workshop conducted by Chauncey Bell. You are in for a treat. To take full advantage of the opportunity, we request that you prepare yourself for the workshop by doing the following homework:
Required Homework
As part of your preparation, we ask you to do four things: review the prep call (if you did not attend the original Zoom meeting), a brief exercise in observing, a couple of interviews, and the preparation of a “case” that you would be interested in exploring with the workshop leaders as part of our work together.
1. Prep Call - 9 Principles for Navigation
We invite you to watch a two-hour session to prepare for our Wise Organizations? Workshop. The session is intended for workshop participants with and without experience in the traditions in which Chauncey Bell and his colleagues have been working for over 30 years.
In this session Chauncey will:
1. Offer a brief overview of the plans for the workshop, its contents, the promises and benefits we are committed to producing there and will invite preparation that will help participants get the most out of attendance.
2. Explore the interpretations of listening and language, emotions and moods, and money and capital upon which the workshop is built.
3. Invite participants to bring specific case examples that can be explored during the workshop.
2. Observing Exercise
The observing exercise is very simple. One of the fundamental claims of the tradition in which we offer the workshop is that we human beings create our worlds in language. I ask that you print out the suggestions for observing attached to this note, and then go for a walk in your neighborhood for at least a half hour. While you are walking, devote your attention to noticing and naming the way your world has been invented. Take the list along with you in order to prompt yourself as you walk, notice, and name aspects of your world visible in your walk. The list is far from comprehensive. What additions did you see in your walk? We will ask you in the workshop what you saw during your walk.
3. Interviewing Exercise
The interviewing exercise will take you about an hour for each of two interviews. Your assignment is to pick two people to conduct interviews with, ask them to be your subjects for the interviews, and then to interview them using the attached notes as your guide for how to do the interview. You can pick anyone you want to interview, as long as they are people who have some form of traditional work in the world. Your interviewees can be friends or members of your family, or they can be a client or someone you are ambitious to become a client of yours.
You will interview them about their working situation. You will be doing this to model – to test and practice – a very special way of conducting an interview that is an integral part of the practices that we will be working with in the Workshop. (Don’t hesitate to do additional interviews if you have the time or inclination.) You will find some very interesting things happen to both the interviewer and the interviewee when you become competent at doing these “interviews”.
Bring the notes that you take during the interviews with you to the workshop. We will speak about your experience there.
4. Prepare a Case Example
During the workshop we will be doing a long session where we will work on cases brought by the participants. These cases may present challenges of launching new initiatives, sales, diagnosis, execution, or other matters of interest in relationship with clients. We invite you to take a few minutes and make notes about some situation where you have been challenged, puzzled, have questions, or would otherwise be interested in our exploring your case with you. We are not asking that you present a written characterization of the case; rather that you are prepared to talk about the situation you found.
Optional Homework
Watch a 10-min Video on Observing Action, Waste, and Value
Review the Promises of Benefits
Make Powerful Diagnoses: This workshop will prepare you to develop fresh, distinctive, and compelling interpretations of the situations in which enterprises find themselves, how they came to be in those situations, and what is holding them there.
Capitalize on Vast Coordination Wastes: You will learn how to observe coordination waste (it does not show up in traditional accounting), where it comes from, how to reduce and overcome it, and how to unlock these hidden reservoirs of capital.
Produce New (and Larger) Opportunities: We will explore strategies and practices for developing conversations and orchestrating moods with colleagues, superiors, and clients in which new and larger opportunities can be revealed. The practices we will explore work in situations with unsettled and stormy waters as well as circumstances where people are ‘asleep.’
Succeed in Challenging Projects: You will gain sensibilities and skills for observing and navigating in in critical dimensions of challenging projects – capital flows, political structures, and how power is distributed.
Design More Effective Coordination: In the workshop and ongoing practice, you will greatly improve your capacity to observe coordination, human interactions, and the changes that are unfolding in the world. You will build improved capacity to design, bring, and coordinate the practices of working in the enterprise to help you cope and thrive as change unfolds.
Improve Skills for Designing Development Programs: You will be substantially better prepared to define appropriate developmental programs and transformational practices for yourself, your team, and your community.
Review the Theoretical Underpinnings of Language Action
In the following videos, Chauncey Bell, takes us through a brief history and introduction to the discipline and theory of Language Action and related areas. If you are not familiar with the background of the work that Chauncey Bell and his colleagues have been doing for the past 30 years, this will be beneficial to review before the workshop.