The InterActive Organisation

[BJ Peters]

Harrison-- I so appreciate this frame of starting from a position of
belief that the client is already there. It feels like a "mindopen" of
appreciation and honoring much like Fritz Perl's Gestalt model for
individual therapy. How we treat others in client systems and other
life interactions is so different from this frame than form the one
that labels and judges. Thanks for sharing this. --BJ

BJ Peters
bjp1 at cox.net
602.279.4805

"Ring the bell that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That is how light gets in."
-Author Unknown

On Tuesday, February 24, 2004, at 07:03 AM, Harrison Owen wrote:

> Michael -- this looks like a great adventure. Wish I could join you all
> in person. But failing that, here are some thoughts you might want to
> kick around. In my own practice, I find it useful to start from the
> position (at least in my own mind) that the client is already there,
> but
> just doesn't recognize their true situation. This start point makes a
> major difference in terms of how hard I have to work, and what needs to
> be done. If the client is "already there" there is no need for me (or
> us) to design an InterActive Organization, or even implement somebody
> else's design. Simultaneously, I can say to the client -- Look, this is
> not about doing something new and radical. It is really about being
> fully and intentionally what you already are. Enabling the client to
> achieve this awareness is all about engaging in a process of
> appreciative inquiry (small "a", small "I") or maybe formally "doing"
> AI??? So -- "Let's look at what works, and how it really works." The
> ensuing dialogue can go all over the place, but it usually covers the
> following sorts of stuff -- Starting with the organizational chart.
>
> Everybody knows of course that the organization is a steeply ranked
> hierarchy -- with all control clearly centered at the top, and in the
> hands of the Senior person (CEO, MD, Director) And we know that,
> because
> that is the picture we have in our minds or framed on the wall. And
> yet,
> if you push a little bit, it turns out that little if anything actually
> works the way the picture says it should. Good ideas come from all over
> the place, projects are initiated from the "Skunk works" that don't
> even
> show up on the Org Chart. Most of all, it turns out that if all command
> and control is actually held by that single, almighty MD/CEO, the
> organization is but a short step away from death by organizational
> hardening of the arteries. Come the next shift in the environment
> (large
> or small) -- the rigid face of things just cracks. The nasty secret is
> that real work, really gets done interactively -- despite our best
> efforts to the contrary. So it might seem that we are working much too
> hard to fix something that ain't broke. We simply have to get out of
> its
> way so that it can easily do what it does naturally. Or something ???
>
> Harrison

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