OL 501

Characteristics of Effective Organization

This course delineates how and why organizations come into being, and examines the way in which they operate as mirror images of their leaders. The course includes a comprehensive review of the degree program’s purpose and direction, establishing the overarching program goals, performance expectations, and strategies for learning. It is grounded in the notion that leadership is a path, not a destination. Participants confront the paradoxical nature of leadership (i.e. what it takes to achieve success in the face of the unknown). Using generative and experiential practices, participants identify their moral voice, engage in collective problem solving, and access the inherent need for connectivity and community.

Transcendence and transformation, foundational forms of change, are omni-present in organizations. The overarching goal of this course is to enable participants to identify and apply elements of personal transcendence and transformation to effect organizational change. Colleagues come to understand the principles of generative leadership as a theoretical body of knowledge that enables practitioners to be confident, grounded in organizational realities, and prepared for the challenges inherent in creating a sustainable organizational culture. Positive intentionality, moral purpose, and shared vision are also explored as elements of generative leadership. The course provides a functional entrée to self-development within formal organizational structures, establishing the “evolutionary” ground from which effective leadership emerges.

This course presents an in-depth and authoritative study of the fundamental principles and assumptions underlying organizational structures, philosophies, and practices. It provides the foundation for building an intellectual understanding of organizational communities that have moral purpose and shared goals among all stakeholders. The aim of the course is to identify and analyze specific organizational frameworks (e.g., Railroad Theory, Pyramid Theory, and High Performance Theory), selected managerial constructs, and diverse community-building strategies. Protocols for systemic assessment and evaluation are reviewed and applied in real world contexts.

Stewardship is the work of “care taking” and, as such, is grounded in supervision. The word supervision, however, conjures images of authoritarian frameworks in which people are told what, when, where, and how to do their jobs. In the possibility of supervision, on the other hand, the object of supervision shifts from people to the field in which people are engaged. Instead of enforcing prescriptions for results using incentives, this new interpretation of supervision enables outcomes to be measured in qualitative terms. This course explores specific, results-driven supervisory tasks that can be used to steward personnel toward personal and organizational goals.

In addition to its function as “caretaking”, stewardship also involves the communication of experience and transfer of knowledge. Thus it finds a useful context in the act of mentoring. This course defines mentoring in its myriad forms and applications, with particular emphasis on mentoring techniques that strengthen morale and an ethic of teamwork. It also provides access to contextual frameworks in which management can ensure the retention and continued growth of personnel through sustained staff development.

The final dimension of stewardship is facilitation – the work of “generating fields-in-play”. This aspect of stewardship allows for the potential of supervision and mentoring to be fully realized. Through rigorous facilitation, vision can move from possibility to reality. In organizational contexts where results are paramount to performance, the quality of facilitation determines the success or failure of stewardship. This course defines and applies facilitation as a rigorous discipline and provides a non-prescriptive construct for its application in diverse organizational structures.

Management constitutes the operational manifestation of stewardship. It is the organizational field in which supervision, mentoring, and facilitation arise. In this course, the management framework is constructed and explored in relationship to stakeholder’s interests, talents, and needs as these impact organizational goals.

The aim of this course is to explore the inter-relationships that exist among information accuracy, perceived realities, and fields of possibility. The course explores the dynamics of language, culture, and responsibility as they affect organizational efficacy. Participants design quantitative and qualitative research methodologies to measure organizational change and make informed decisions regarding the organization’s current level of efficacy.

Speculation is, in part, the work of imagination coupled with the thoughtful use of conjecture on behalf of determining the validity of new ideas and/or realities. With speculation, the core question is not, “will a specific idea work?” but rather “how will this impact productivity and accountability?” This subtle shift is one in which the object of inquiry is focused not on workability, but on how making a difference in the organization's culture is integral to the change process. This course sets the stage for using speculation as a powerful tool that facilitates organizational change. Participants learn to engage in speculation that is highly focused and provides opportunities for convergent and divergent thinking.
 

Piloting is the work of moving possibility along a spectrum of feasibility by exploring applications of new realities under controlled conditions. This course provides participants with frameworks for designing pilots, evaluating their outcomes, and capturing the learning that is manifest in the piloting process. Participants explore practical approaches to organizational evaluation design, and implement qualitative evaluative instruments. They also apply the concept of outcome monitoring to measure the organization’s intent and effect.

Development constitutes the organizational manifestation of efficacy, which is the operational field in which testing, speculating, and piloting arise. In this course, development is revealed and testing, speculating, and piloting are defined in relationship – one with the other and all to the field. All learning from courses 508 – 510 come together in 511 to demonstrate the design of development and its importance to organizational efficacy. The concept of development is also analyzed as a cultural change agent. Participants explore and categorize human rationality (e.g., motives of self-interest) as they impact organized expressions of efficacy. When development is distinct, organizational change is disciplined and happens with considerable velocity.

The art of managing focuses on the execution of leadership. The task of managing centers on the day-to-day affairs of the organization’s culture, on the morale of its personnel, and on the systems that facilitate productivity and accountability. In this course managing is explored as foundational to sustaining organizational conversations that create and promote possibility. Participants analyze patterns of mutual obligation and duty as managerial tenets, evaluate theories of managerial practice, assess hierarchical systems of control, and evaluate the impact of the leader within a “change” paradigm.

Leadership focuses on the future of an organization by looking to new possibilities. Those who lead must be able to go beyond knowing what is possible to visioning new possibilities, thus choosing wisely from a multiplicity of future options. The aim of this course is to explore processes where leading is not an a priori function of position (i.e., power of position). Participants explore and analyze leadership as a prescriptive pedagogy, analyze organizational change systems that are rules-based, and evaluate the role of collaboration and control as organizational "pendulums".

Developing demands that possibility move along a continuum of feasibility. One task of developing is to take new possibilities that prove to be unworkable and discard them early in the piloting process. Simultaneously, developing is the task of nurturing those dimensions of a new possibility that have met early feasibility tests and ground them in a new reality for the organization. The aim of the course is to investigate practices in which exemplary developing processes are modeled. Participants explore the effects of incentive-based policies for organizational change, understand and apply the principles of community-building as a function of language, and contrast executive images of leadership with collegial images of leadership and normative and/or moral theories of leadership.

Leadership, in effect, constitutes the organizational manifestation of possibility, which is the organizational field in which managing, leading and developing arise. Distinguishing leadership reveals the source of possibility in all forms of social systems. Because popular business literature frequently collapses the attributes of leadership with those of management, organizations often glean inconsistent results in both domains. The goal of this course is to illuminate the myriad expressions of “Leadership as Possibility” and to describe the processes necessary for accessing cultural (i.e., organizational) insight, fostering opportunities for strategic breakthroughs, and utilizing “nuance” as an indicator of cultural understanding.

The existence of every organization is manifest in multiple and concurrent states of reality. Therefore, each organization experiences what organizational theorists call the “natural state” or “primary state”, i.e., that state when nothing unusual is occurring. There are also other identified states that occur under stress (referred to as the “secondary” and “tertiary states”). Examples of what might induce stress in one or more areas of organization include large-scale change brought about by alterations in business direction, industry change, or regulatory impositions. This course focuses on analyzing various states of being (e.g., culture, morale, formal and informal channels of authority) within both for-profit and not-for-profit entities. Participants examine the naturally occurring states of an organization and their relationship to the dimensions of leadership, development, and management.

This capstone course, an action research experience, provides participants with an opportunity to explore their leadership potential through mentored, on-the-job observations and applications. The Culminating, or Breakthrough Project is based in participant-driven design and self-directed field inquiry. Participants demonstrate an understanding of the principles of generative leadership through applied practice.