Activate Leadership, Community, Ownership with Open Culture Project Circles
Are you seeing the behavior change and engagement you need to succeed with a key initiative? You may have tried many things and have yet to experience that critical shift in mindset among your people that leads to inspired, committed action and innovation. It may be time to have deeper conversations in your organization.
We’d love to talk with you about bringing Open Culture Project Circles to your organization.
This innovative, web-based, highly interactive program integrates coaching, training, action-learning, peer-mentoring and community-building. It was designed to accelerate achieving targeted outcomes in any or all of the following areas:
Cultivating engagement and innovation across departments and responsibility levels
Respect for differences, inclusion, building awareness of who’s missing from conversations
Cultivating collaboration and ownership around an issue or goal
Building alignment, working collectively, breaking down silos
Improved results
Creating a compelling shared vision of what’s possible
About Open Culture Project Circles
Engaging others in conversation about what is deeply meaningful and what’s possible together can be transformative. Yet, many of us don’t speak much to those with beliefs or lifestyles different from ours. At the same time, many of us are very concerned about issues affecting our communities and organizations.
The purpose of Open Culture Project Circles is to build self-awareness, skills and community, and provide opportunity and support for intentional action. Participants are invited to take on small projects and receive guidance and support as they form and implement them. A key focus is to create awareness about the fact that each of us is open and closed to various things, and that this is something we all have in common. When we model being open, we often provoke openness in others; openness is contagious. The simple act of modeling openness can expand possibility.
When we are open, we are empathetic and can co-create productive conversations and innovative approaches. Being open involves deep listening to another and for what’s possible together. Conversation is at the heart of leadership and how we work together. The Open Culture Project Circles offer learning, tools and practice to support modeling being open and engaging in open-minded conversations.
Program elements for organizations:
Clarify goals for the program, desired outcomes, measures of success.
For example, organizational goals may include:
bridging organizational divides due to silos or other issues
activating leadership development and empowerment
expanding collaboration and organizational learning and agility
behavior change, including speaking up, taking ownership, enhanced self-esteem
cultural change and integration
inclusion of more voices, concerns, perspectives
Depending on the organizational goal, four to six 90-minute interactive live video learning and discussion sessions every other week over eight to twelve weeks, via the Zoom online platform.
Participants are invited to take on a project within the context of the organizational goal, and utilize the facilitators and cohort colleagues in clarifying and implementing the projects.
Participants receive coaching and support from the facilitator and peers.
Projects may be as simple or as complex as participants choose.
Participants are encouraged to develop personal practices to support being open.
Participants are encouraged to communicate with at least one other participant between formal sessions.
Customization, as needed, to include specific learning content and focus to support achieving identified program goals.
Learning topics include
Levels of listening that impact understanding and mindset
Body language and how it impacts openness and possibility
Emotions and moods are contagious
What causes you to be closed around others? Are you open?
Your personal practices
The power of empathy and appreciation
Respect and creating community
Open, generative conversations for shared solutions
Benefits
Enhanced self-awareness
Empowerment to initiate action on an intention that is clarified with the cohort
Learning how to be more open to possibilities
Participation in a supportive community to realize projects
Support for taking intentional action on something that matters to you
Experience innovation, solutions and a co-creating community
Background on the Open Conversation Project
The Open Conversation Project began as an inquiry into how we might create a way for people to come together to begin to cultivate common ground and understanding through conversation at a time of great polarity, and complex challenges. The Open Conversation Project was developed as part of the Societal Transformation Lab initiative of MIT’s Presencing Institute. 300 groups from around the world participated. Ann Van Eron and Jackie Sloane recruited a team of colleagues who together conducted over 100 interviews to learn more about what makes individuals closed and open in their interactions with others. We worked with the Presencing Institute’s processes to synthesize and review learnings from the process.
We agree with David Brooks, New York Times columnist and news commentator, who has suggested that the polarization we are seeing in the world is less related to progressive vs. conservative views, but is more about being open vs. closed. Many are sensing that old systems are failing people and this is a time of volatility and uncertainty on many levels. According to MIT’s Otto Scharmer, author of Theory U, co-founder of the Presencing Institute and leader of the Societal Transformation Lab, what is needed is a shift from ego-system awareness to eco-system awareness (a focus from me to we). Ann Van Eron and Jackie Sloane, seasoned consultants and executive coaches, have experienced the transformative power of conversation. They have supported many clients of all sizes, including privately-held, not-for-profit, public sector and Fortune 100 firms across across industries and functions in having open, generative conversations, that produce unpredictable and sustainable outcomes. We believe that if we can engage in open conversations with one another, we can collectively find creative solutions to many of our challenges.
“The conversation was transformational.”
“Our work together was very beneficial. I appreciated being able to speak frankly, the trust we developed, and your honesty and straightforwardness in pointing things out to me. I’m more proactive, strategic and as a result, more effective and confident. I’ve created a plan and agreements around everything I need to accomplish. I’ve developed a stronger presence at meetings. I’ve become more self-aware – of my own capabilities, and to tap into them more, and about messages I send in how I act and hold myself. I use what
I’ve learned in developing my staff to become more effective leaders. I was very satisfied with the process and the outcome.”
Jim Sifuentes, Vice President, Mission and Community Development, Saint Anthony Hospital