Members of the OST community can deliver transformations and risk analysis using practical tools underpinned by reliable social science theory, including the Search Conference (SC), the Participative Design Workshop (PDW) and Unique Designs. Contact a practitioner from our practitioner to find out more.
Search Conference
All organisations and communities today need to periodically take stock of themselves in their rapidly changing environments and plan more adaptive directions and futures. In highly uncertain environments, business leaders must be able to answer: ‘Where do we want to be in year X within the context of this uncertainty?’
To answer this strategic question, we work with leaders to apply an active adaptive planning method known as the Search Conference (SC), which has been translated from Open Systems Theory (OST). It’s a large group planning methodology designed to produce a learning, planning leadership team committed to producing a comprehensive active adaptive future for their organisation and the action plans to meet this active adaptive future.
Participative Design Workshops
To ensure active adaptive futures are met, business leaders are changing their organisational design principles from inefficient bureaucracies to democratic team-based structures where change, adaptability and agility are natural and inherent.
The active adaptivity method developed to change organisational design principles is the Participative Design Workshop (PDW). Like the Search Conference, it’s a methodology that has been translated from Open Systems Theory. It’s an efficient process for creating democratic team-based structures where the basic unit of work is the self-managing group and where group members have a shared responsibility for meeting their agreed goals.
Making the design principle change from bureaucracy to self-managing groups is one of the most critical steps for creating the conditions for continuous adaption, agility and improvement. Only when these conditions are in place are employees motivated to quickly adapt to a rapidly changing environment and utilise advanced technology to continually improve the customer experience and business performance.
Unique Designs
A unique design combines elements of Search Conference and Participative Design Workshops in a custom format unique to your context. These are normally designed and facilitated by an experienced practitioner to ensure that the principles of OST are ‘baked-in’ to the event.