Workshop: Leading and Facilitating Transformation in Organisations: 6-8 Dec 2017 (Cape Town)

-
Purpose of this course: We are being called upon to transform from the personal to the organizational level – for many this is new territory! For those leading – new ways of being and doing is required. For those facilitating –new approaches and methods are needed. This workshop is about finding a deeper form of engagement with diversity and transformation processes in organisations as well as exploring the inner work required at a personal level. We have to move beyond the rhetoric and ‘just talking about it’. This workshop will emphasize the doing of transformation so that any one no matter where they are in an organisational system can initiate change and transformation.
Venue: The CDRA Centre (www.cdra.org.za) - 52-54 Francis street, Woodstock
Dates: Wednesday 6 Dec (9.30am – 4.30pm), Thursday 7 Dec (9.30am – 4.30pm), Friday 8 Dec (9.30am – 1.30 pm)
Cost: R3000 per person To register mail desireepaulsen@gmail.com
Limited scholarships and reduced rates available; *group rates for 3 or more
NB: This short course can also be offered as an in-house workshop for organisations and can be adapted and designed for the organisation's need.
We will work with the complexities of diversity and transformation – focusing on the leading and facilitation of processes of transformation in organisations acknowledging that social justice needs to happen internally if organisations are to achieve integrity in their work externally - the workshop will include developing skills and building capacities to work with and courageously address the issues facing organisations, as well as exploring what it means to do the work more deeply at a personal level offering reflective spaces and opportunities for learning more about self and each other.
The workshop will include:
·         New ways of thinking about transformation and change
·         Critical examination of our behaviours and practices
·         Approaches for facilitating new forms of engagement, dialogue and conversation
·         A range of methods to engage more humanely: the practice of active listening and sharing of stories and working with artistic creative methodologies
·         Leadership and management principles, practices and approaches for working with complexity in race, diversity and transformation
Methodologies used in the workshop:
The overall approach will be highly participatory and interactive with inputs from the facilitator at specific moments, working with what emerges from the group through conversation, activities for individual and group – reflective exercises and activities to allow for sharing and learning, movies and video clips to introduce the topics, creative exercises to surface feelings and learnings and encouraging shared learning between participants.
 Facilitated by Desiree Paulsen (Adv Dipl UCT, Mphil UWC)
Desiree facilitates organizational transformation at universities, schools, NGOs and corporate sector. She has 15 years of experience in the field of organizational transformation and 23 years experience as a facilitator of learning having worked in training and community development largely with organisations involved in social transformation. For more about her work see blog site and linkedin profile:
 Feedback from a participant of this workshop (run in Durban in September 2017):
From Warren Banks (OD practitioner, facilitator, writer) - after attending the 3 day Facilitating Organisational Transformation workshop facilitated in Durban, South Africa.
 This workshop accomplished so much in less than 3-days!
I was left with a lot more clarity on how conditioned our society is towards white supremacy. As a white person, born male and English-speaking in 1976, and involved in progressive movements and in human rights work for many years, I’ve still often been blind to who and what is being excluded from spaces and conversations… Excluded by language, by assumptions of how the world should work, by ingrained but empty self-concepts of superiority or inferiority.
I think this awareness of whiteness, history and power is a critical ingredient if we want to build a different kind of community that welcomes the potentials and gifts of everyone. And I believe that’s also what development should be all about. But we can’t get there without working with and shifting our mental models and the stories we tell about our country, ourselves and each other.
Bottomline: if we don’t do this inner work, we can never have a really “New”, healthy and (more) unified South Africa. Economic and structural interventions are not enough - they need to be underpinned by shifts in our ways of seeing the world, ourselves and each other. (And when I say ‘our’ I mean all of us as South Africans.) That is what this workshop aims to do - and succeeds in.
I began to learn how to listen differently - with more depth and perhaps with a bit more nuance than I've managed before. I will bring this new awareness to my practice as I start working with South African clients again after some years of work elsewhere on the continent.
Desiree Paulsen’s facilitation created an energizing space for people to be honest and to connect with themselves, each other and some critical historical and social facts. Her use of video as a stimulus for conversation was excellent. And she generously shared some of her own experiences and vulnerabilities in ways that supported honest engagement from participants. I loved the creative exercises which encouraged us to come into contact with the past, the present and our potential, shared future. I would unreservedly recommend her and this process to anyone wanting to explore issues of race, power and diversity - particularly from a South African perspective.
I have done personal work in this area before: non-racial approaches in NUSAS, valuing diversity workshops in organisations, and more confronting anti-bias/anti-racism and process-oriented psychology (process work) experiences. But there was something special about this workshop; something that connected all of us in a new way. I believe this lay in the deep and mutual respect that everyone in the room developed for each other over the course of two days - role modeled by our facilitator (and to be completely fair, a pretty amazing group of participants. The process was challenging, stimulating and inspiring for me and I think, most of the group. And this was achieved without othering anyone involved. It was an experience of inclusion; it felt like coming home.………………………………………………………………………………………………………
More quotes from participants who prefer to remain anonymous:
Just dropping in to tell you that "A new South Africa is indeed possible"! This I know from my weekend interaction with you all. A new window was opened and I am looking out at new possibilities where it seemed hopeless as I watched the racial polarisation divide getting wider and wider over the last few years. 
My confidence in being able to do the work required to help facilitate the change management processes has taken another step up from all the workshop material and personal interaction with you. 
Thank you Desiree for your "Great Work". I am looking forward to doing The Great Work myself in collaboration with you all. 
…………………………………………………………………………………
I experienced being with all of you like being home. Thank you for the warm, compassionate, engaged, welcoming, intelligent and soulful space. On Thursday night I had wondered what on earth had possessed me to sign up for a weekend workshop - and only the commitment I had made kept me in. Now I am grateful that I signed up, and arrived and experienced the richness of a very special group of people to whom I would love to stay connected in whatever way unfolds.………………………………………………………………………………………………………Much food for thought and action, a sense that the mist has cleared a little and celebration that we are the start of the community we envisioned.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Journaling as reflective practice

-
Image
Journaling as reflective practice Journals and diaries have been used ever since people could find ways of capturing their thoughts and ideas. Many people have used it as a deeply personal process, others to capture important moments and events in their lives. Journals can also be used as part of a conscious practice of reflecting and learning. As organisational development practitioners, often we are very action oriented and may not always make time to capture or document through writing. Our work may already be consumed with many other writing tasks like field reports, developing materials and donor reports and the thought of starting a journal may seem like an indulgence. If we can begin to see journaling as part of a reflective practice and not an indulgence we can begin an exciting self-directed learning process. Journals can become an important reflective tool for practitioners who want to become more conscious of how they practice. The advantage of a journal is t...
Read more

The role of the facilitator in working with organisations in crisis

-
Image
The role of facilitators working with organizations in crisis (A reworked piece I wrote a few years ago for a newsletter for the previous organisation I worked at www.cdra.org.za) ) In organisational systems crisis should be seen as a natural part of normal organizational development. Some organisations manage to work through crisis whilst others may allow it to destroy them or refuse to see or recognize the crisis (opting for a denial or 'head in the ground' approach). Crisis may be full blown or it may be simmering underground and often presented under the guise of “we need new leadership, we need restructuring or we need teambuilding”. The symptoms are: relationships have broken down, colleagues no longer see the good in each other only the bad, gossiping has reached monumental proportions, cliques have formed often around those who have more power and those who have less (often around differing ideologies, philosophies, rank/position, gender, culture, race, ...
Read more

Transformation: Resilience, Tenacity and the Art of never giving up

-
Image
Facilitating Race and Transformation Processes Vision board done in 2018 I have been doing race and transformation work most of my life, but professionally as a facilitator now for about 10 years and as an organisational development practitioner for 17 years. I became an activist at the age of 10 after the 1976 riots and the area around our school was under siege from apartheid police forces –  At the same time my primary school teacher provided most of my formative political education in essence providing our young minds with much needed decolonized education - my first act of activism was to distribute pamphlets for boycotting Fattis and Monis, a food company that was treating its workers unfairly.  My grandfather Dr Norman Murison, a community doctor and banned activist in the 1960’s was the other person beside my parents Norma Tobin and Ernest Tobin who were conscientising me and showing me what the apartheid government was doing to our people and our cou...
Read more