What a year! Despite craziness and constraints we can find the accomplishments, victories, and a place of gratitude to celebrate.
Celebrate in-person (& virtually), live, safely, and easily with Face The Music
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We have shifted into unknown territory, perhaps desiring for this to end and get back to our usual and reliable lives. But the general case with liminal space and the corresponding transitions is that there is movement to a new order, hopefully a higher order where the transition period helps birth necessary changes in the evolution of consciousness.
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A lot has been written about the pace of change in our culture, society, economy, and business world; and also about the need to adapt from an incidental change-if-we-must mindset to one of continuous change and adaptation. “How do you do that?” One approach, which I will discuss here, is to develop a cultural trait of looking for change opportunities in smaller and smaller increments of time with the context and knowledge of the agreed need for just-in-time adaptation.
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“The greatest problems that ever faced industry and the nation are ahead of us. There never was a time when leaders in industry were so anxious to discus vital issues, compare experiences, and get light.” -1918
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Context is our personal and collective mindset/frame of reference. We all have one. The cool thing is that we can consciously shift our context and define one that works for creating what we want to manifest. We shift our context by changing internal and external conversations.
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The term “team building” gets thrown around a lot in organizations, and means a lot of different things to different people. It runs the spectrum from a boss bringing in pizza for her group to a long-term, focused development program that has the intention of developing a high-functioning, high-performance team.
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Training on unconscious bias--discussions, brainstorming, experiential pieces that take people out of their usual business environment and their comfort zone to have a new conversation. They want it to look and feel different!
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The structure and relationships of the parts determine how the system expresses itself, and sometimes small, leveraged changes can make large impacts on the dynamics and results. Here are a few modalities practitioners experiment with that can support the transformational process.
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The audience was fervent, clapping with the music, and cheering for the moves. Certainly, there were various levels of dance proficiency displayed, but the energy and fun was in high gear.
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The CEO comes on to the stage at the annual meeting and starts in on a cryptic introduction—"Today we have something very special in store for you." He's standing at a mic in front of drums, amplifiers—a whole band setup.
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Let's say you're head of a division (or section, unit, department, functional area, tribe, clan, regiment, battalion, company, platoon, etc). You're looking for high-functioning alignment—effective, efficient work flow, communications, adaptation, full use of resources.
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Purpose is the big container that can make a difference in everything you do together. Communicate the purpose of the team with your people....
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It has come to our attention through observation and interactions with human systems that there is a certain polarized paradigm circulating about that merits our attention perhaps. It has to do with a distinction between work and fun/enjoyment/creativity/personal time.
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Design included presentations on shared terminology and background, role play skits dramatizing different types of unconscious bias, group discussions, songs that illustrate the themes, songwriting about the participants' "bias blues", debrief of experiential activities to get insights into the organizational system as it pertains to the subject, and planning to make decisions on what actions to take going forward.
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Engaging and Re-Igniting Our Global Workforce Through Sustainable Economic and Talent Development
Pursuant to that, the 15 or so participants and their BPI hosts were to spend some time at the United Nations on the Monday following the Sunday opening meeting at the Waldorf.
About the meeting from BPI founder and CEO Louis Carter (see article 2)...
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In B. Kliban's cartoon, "Bach Sculpting", we see Johan Sebastian Bach awkwardly crafting his lumpy-dumpy statuette while his piano sits unused in the background. I've felt my own version of Bach Sculpting many times on the job as I'm working some task where I know there are many people that have the skills to do this better, more efficiently and expertly than I will ever be able to do this...
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Jamming is collaboratively improvising music that is fun, innovative, in-the-moment, feeds to and from each of the participants, and has an underlying structure that everyone doing it understands. What would it be like if everyone on your team at work was jamming together? How would it feel? What kind of results would you be getting?
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I first came to Nashville after bouncing back and forth to California the month before. Calif had just helped me get over the late Winter Catskill funk that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with wind, snow, cold, and the feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of the Nashville trip, it was still cold...
Read MoreSome intense organizational work! So why did they decide to take 3 hours of their day to write and perform songs with Face The Music? The lead designer and facilitator explains, "It's one thing to talk about communicating differently, taking risks, challenge, and uncertainty; we wanted something that brings that conversation to life in real time.
Read MoreSuddenly, it had a point of view that it didn't have before based on my life experience. As an artist, if you resist your life experiences and try to keep them on the same track then your works seems kind of hollow and shallow to me at the end because I didn't follow the way the work was taking me...
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