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Understanding Organizational Development

Ken Helsley, MBA

Organizational Development (OD) is a term that is used in many different ways by many different organizations. OD can seem to be a mysterious process that often confuses even the most skilled business leaders.

This book is a case driven program that will help to clarify OD and help you better understand how OD can help your organization better institute change, improve performance, or engage in a major organizational paradigm shift.

By completing Understanding Organizational Development, the learner will gain a solid understanding of the history and science behind OD, how OD can best fit into your organization, and whether an internal OD practitioner or outside OD Consulting firm is the best fit for your organizations needs.

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Digital Storytelling

Laura Davis

While the technique of telling stories is the oldest form of communication, it’s also the one form that rises above the din of our information-saturated environment and delivers messages in a way that connects with people, bringing ideas to life, and making them actionable and memorable.

Digital storytelling fuses that ancient oral tradition with the magic of 21st century technology. Because of the multi-dimensional effects they employ, digital stories resonate on deeply emotional and subconscious levels. A perfect fit with Web 2.0 technology, digital storytelling can broadcast a message to any audience around the globe.

Digital Storytelling can be used within organizations as a tool for knowledge transfer, to add value to a brand, as a marketing technique, to inform stakeholders, as a way to reach out to the community, and a host of other applications.

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Creating Internal Service Agreements: Creating Internal Service Agreements

Sharon Mulgrew, M.P.H.

We want to flatten hierarchies and manage by coordinating. We can do that most effectively by building a collaborative network.

When we focus on individual impact alone, we find that well meaning managers focus on optimizing our departments. We don’t see ourselves as a player in the wider network. We undervalue the contribution we could make to our colleagues and the larger organization. And, we miss the opportunity to collaborate.

When we depend on our individually oriented “silos,” we hit a lower productivity ceiling quickly.

The most effective way to break through is to create a collaborative network. Here, the right resources at the right time flow easily wherever they are needed within the organization.

Creating Internal Service Agreements, Books 1 and 2, give you a systematic approach to breaking through your "silo" ceiling, engaging you in crucial business relationships, and launching your active collaborative network.

Sharon Mulgrew knows that successful network collaboration depends on clear relevant agreements. Her 8-step process helps you build the necessary skills and commitment. Book 1 focuses on the first 3 steps.

In Creating Internal Service Agreements, Book 1, you get the step-by-step skills and support you need to prepare yourself to engage in respectful and reasonable service partnering agreements. You learn to assess the current level of collaboration in your organization; to hold an effective launch meeting; and to identify your essential contribution to your organizational network.

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Making Meetings More Productive: The Basics
Dean Herrington

Making Meetings More Productive:The Basics introduces the “super secret scientific formula” for planning and conducting much more productive business meetings, which is:

MP = R x P x P x P, where,
R = Roles
P = Purposes
P = Procedures
P = Proxemics

In this book you will:

• Learn about the two major meeting elements: Content and Process.

• Examine the four most crucial meeting Roles: Meeting Leader, Recorder, Timer, and Participants.

• Encounter the five major Purposes for having a meeting: Information Sharing, Problem Analysis, Solution Seeking (also called Idea Generating), Decision Making, and Action Planning.

• Explore a number of discussion Procedures which can be used to conduct meetings, including Round Robin, Spit-Wads, Fishbone, etc.

• Discover the impact that Proxemics, the arrangement of the room, seating positions and placement of audio/video equipment, has on the dynamics of a meeting.

Think of this book as your bachelor’s degree in meetings, and the next three books in this series as your advanced degrees.

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Making Meetings More Productive: Advanced Concepts and Techniques
By Dean Harrington

In the first book in this series, we introduced the formula for a successful meeting, one element of which was meeting procedures. In this book, we’ll expand on the concept of accelerated meeting techniques, delving into the anatomy of a meeting procedure, and giving detailed instructions for using a wide variety of techniques for conducting a wide variety of meetings. We’ll remind you how to identify the purpose(s) of your meeting and how to match that purpose with an appropriate accelerated technique (or procedure) for conducting that meeting. Detailed instructions for using every procedure are provided.

This book will also introduce the concept of highly detailed agenda planning, presenting a number of meeting planning tools, including

• The Meeting Options Matrix (MOM).
• The Attendee Invitation Matrix (AIM).
• Sample meeting agendas.
• Blank agenda planning forms for you to print out and use.
• The Meeting Leader’s Tool Kit.

There’s also a "bonus section" full of ideas for spurring creativity in idea generating meetings.

Additionally, we'll introduce a simple tool for assessing the overall value of all the meetings held in your organization, The Meeting Effectiveness Mini-Survey. We'll also include a section on evaluating individual meetings, and three different tools for doing so.

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Making Meetings More Productive: Managing Meeting Dysfunctions
Dean Herrington

In this book, the third in the Making Meetings More Productive series, we introduce the concept of managing meeting dysfunctions. It will present the following thought process when determining how to manage a dysfunction:

Frequency and Magnitude of the dysfunction determines your reaction time and the power of your intervention.

Frequency: How often has this dysfunction occurred? Is it the first time or the fourth time that two participants have engaged in a side conversation?

Magnitude: How big a dysfunction is it? Is it quiet and barely noticeable, or is it loud and obvious to everyone?

Reaction Time: Some meeting leaders seem to have very high reaction thresholds; meaning it takes a huge group dysfunction to get them to react. Their reaction time is delayed. They run the risk of allowing the dysfunction to go on so long that they could totally lose control of the meeting.

Others seem to have very low thresholds, meaning that any little thing seems to set them off. Their reaction time is nearly instantaneous; they react immediately upon the first sign of even the slightest dysfunction. They run the risk of being seen as overly aggressive, and possibly causing more trouble than they were trying to fix.

The art of managing dysfunctions is to time your intervention so it’s fully effective and doesn’t make matters worse than they already are.

Power: Some leaders seem to always choose low power, nearly imperceptible interventions, regardless of how serious the dysfunction is. Others seem to always choose high power interventions, even for minor infractions.

The challenge is to judge the frequency and magnitude of the dysfunction, and make a conscious choice of how to manage it with an appropriate intervention. Too weak an intervention and you don’t have any impact. Too strong an intervention and you can squash any further participation even by those who weren’t part of the dysfunction.

We’ll introduce a four-step process for managing a meeting dysfunction: (1) cushioning, (2) reflecting, (3) coaching, and (4) structuring.

For every dysfunction that you cushion and then reflect, you must make a decision to either coach or structure (you never do both). If you decide to structure, you could also pause and ask a coaching question of yourself, silently, as a way to finely hone the structuring intervention that you’re about to use.

In order to test your ability to manage meeting dysfunctions you’ll be presented with fifteen difficult meeting dysfunction scenarios and will be challenged to come up with detailed strategies for managing all of them. You can then compare your approach with a suggested approach.

Finally, you’ll be challenged to describe a number of meeting dysfunctions that commonly occur in your organization, and come up with a strategy for managing each of them successfully.

It’s going to be a lot of work. Ready?

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Making Meetings More Productive: Advanced Meeting Facilitation
By Dean Herrington

Making Meetings More Productive: Advanced Meeting Facilitation takes the reader beyond the first three books in this series, which focused on the role of the meeting leader in planning and executing productive meetings, and introduces the role of the meeting facilitator. A facilitator is a highly trained professional capable of working with clients (internal or external) to determine the purpose(s) of an upcoming meeting, plan the agenda for that meeting, arrange all the logistics for the meeting, and then actually conduct that meeting for the client.

By reading this book you will

• Understand the unique role of the meeting facilitator.
• Learn to use fourteen vital facilitator skills and tools: listening, questioning, cushioning, silence, paraphrasing, summarizing, reviewing/recapping, encouraging, stacking, redirecting, boomerang, ricochet, nonverbal signals, and range of movement.
• Understand the eight types of power that there are, and know which of those eight types are most important to the success of the meeting facilitator.
• Understand how to work with clients as you move through the four major steps in the Facilitation Preparation Process.
• Understand the various pre-meeting activities you must engage in to be fully prepared for a facilitation assignment.
• Understand the various on-site issues you must be aware of and manage successfully.
• Understand the after-action activities you must engage in to appropriately wrap-up an assignment.

Diligent students of this book (and the other three in this series) will be well prepared to work with clients (internal or external) and to successfully plan and facilitate even the most complex types of meetings.

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