Birgitt and Ward Williams designed the Genuine Contact™
program with simplicity in mind. The program, focusing on attending
to organizational health and balance as a foundation for organizational
success, uses meetings as a catalyst for organizations to develop
as conscious, life nurturing, interconnected creative organizations.
Meetings are used as a catalyst. Management learns to manage differently.
We call these organizations Conscious Open Space Organizations.
The process is organic so that every organization brings about
its own unique change from within.
Within the Genuine Contact™ program, we work from
the following three beliefs:
1. Spirit is all that is.
2. It is imperative that we learn to make life nurturing rather
than life depleting choices.
3. When fear is absent, our contact and connections are genuine.
Genuine contact with the self, one other, the collective(s), and
all of creation is critical to our positive development and evolution
both individually and as a collective.
Within the Genuine Contact™ program, there are
eleven components:
1. We underpin the Genuine Contact™ program with the healing
circle or medicine wheel as the overall matrix for our learning,
healing, development, evolution and consciousness. This assists
us in walking the mystical path with practical feet and bringing
about results that exceed expectations.
2. We offer the International
Alliance for Mentoring (IAM) as a forum to learn the art of
mentoring and to “walk the talk of mentoring” of both
individuals and organizations.
3. We offer the foundational learning journey in Path
to Organizational Health and Balance which offers leaders
an opportunity to make the difference in the performance of your
organization through the importance of balance, cleansing, and
nourishing in a way similar to the holistic approach to the health
of the human body.
4. We offer the foundational learning journey in Achieving
and Regenerating Organizational Health and Balance which explores
the state of health of organizations from a holistic organizational
growth perspective and aids in developing your own prescription
through a self administered diagnosis, towards achieving and maintaining
a healthy organization in these rapidly changing times.
5. We offer the foundational learning journey in Individual
Health and Balance for exploring the state of individual health
and how to maintain a state of optimal health even in highly stressful
situations.
6. We offer the foundational learning journey in Holistic
Leadership Development to develop the skills to be able to
with the new Whole Person Paradigm in this new age of knowledge,
technology and service workers.
7. We offer a learning journey in Working
With Open Space Technology to develop and enhance skills in
facilitating meetings in which a frequency is held for people
to make life nurturing choices from amongst agenda items within
a particular theme and givens.
8. We offer a learning journey in Whole
Person Process Facilitation to develop and enhance skills
in facilitating meetings in which a frequency is held for people
to make life nurturing choices based on what is presented to them
to solve within a particular topic and within stated givens.
9. We offer a learning journey in Cross
Cultural Conflict Resolution to develop and enhance skills
to facilitate meetings in which people determine personal boundaries
and view situations from flexible rather than fixed perspectives.
10. We offer a learning journey in Advanced Work With Open Space
Technology focusing on the Open
Space Organization to develop and enhance skills in leading
and mentoring conscious interconnected learning organizations.
These organizations provide the conditions for choices to be life
nurturing rather than life depleting.
11. We offer a learning journey to develop and enhance skills
to teach others in all of the components of the Genuine Contact™
program, ensuring that the program maintains its integrity (wholeness)
and respects the unique contributions that each individual makes
to the program.
Key concepts supporting these fundamental beliefs and
the development of the Genuine Contact program are:
1. Opportunities for genuine contact begin with the courage to
be in genuine contact with the self and extend into all relationships.
2. Work of, with, from, and to Spirit can be experienced as
a harmonic resonance that can be facilitated, beginning with establishing
the harmonic resonance within the self as the facilitator. This
requires discipline in a state of BEING in this harmonic resonance
as the key work for the facilitator. In doing so, we work with
healing energy, drawing from knowledge in the healing arts.
3. We work with the blueprint for health in the organism (the
individual and/or the organization) by attending to Balance, cleansing,
and nourishing.
4. We use meetings as a catalyst to assisting the organization
attain a state of health and balance. The two meeting methodologies
used are Open Space Technology developed by Harrison Owen of Potomac,
Maryland, USA and Whole Person Process Facilitation developed
by Birgitt Williams of Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. Both meeting
methodologies are highly participative, within a boundary established
by predetermined "givens". Within Open Space Technology,
a harmonic frequency is held for people to make life nurturing
choices from amongst agenda items within a particular theme and
givens. Whole Person Process Facilitation was developed by Birgitt
Williams to complement Working With Open Space Technology as a
meeting methodology equally as participative, with similar values,
and yet serving the organization when a process as open as Open
Space Technology is not appropriate to the agenda and circumstance.
Within Whole Person Process Facilitation, a harmonic frequency
is held for people to make life nurturing choices based on what
is presented to them to solve within a particular topic and within
stated givens. The topics are predetermined, thereby offering
a more obviously structured agenda than Open Space Technology.
5. We work with Open Space Technology and Whole Person Process
Facilitation as interventions that enable health and balance in
the ongoing life of the organization. We recognize these meeting
processes as powerful and impactful in the ongoing life of the
organization, therefore we attend carefully to both the pre-work
(before a meeting) and the debrief work (after the meeting).
6. We recognize that everyone facilitating and leading using
the Genuine Contact™ program will do so with their own unique
style and experience. However, it is also necessary to guarantee
to organizations who bring this Program into the organization
that they are receiving consistency with the component parts and/or
their development as a conscious Open Space Organization. Clients
are entitled to assurance that when they engage in any or all
of the components of the Genuine Contact™ program, that
the components and the whole program maintain the integrity of
what is offered through the Genuine Contact™ program. Within
the Genuine Contact™ program, the component parts are standardized
so that they can be easily duplicated and so that when a client
pays for one of the components to be used in the organization,
the client is guaranteed of a certain standard.
7. We invite consultants to attend the five components of training
of the Genuine Contact™ program to become authorized to
take the full program "in-house" to assist organizations
in their transformation. Graduates of the “train the trainer”
will train people within the organization in the component parts
of the Genuine Contact™ program so that those authorized
through this process in turn will train ever widening circles
of people within the organization. Anyone trained as a trainer
can offer the complete program and authorize those graduating
in turn to train in the Genuine Contact™ program, using
the outline they learn from Dalar International so that there
is consistency and duplicability.
8. Persons completing their training in the Genuine Contact™
program are invited to become co-creators of the program as it
evolves and develops through time, using a list serve and annual
professional development gatherings as the venues for the co-creation.
9. Every year, new graduates will join the growing organization
of co-creators of the Genuine Contact™ program. All "trainers"
will have the opportunity to “walk their talk” as
an interconnected Conscious Open Space Organization in how they
co-create the program always incorporating the full participation
of the newest graduates.
Birgitt and Ward Williams established minimal "givens"
for the Genuine Contact™ program and on September 21st,
2001 invited the graduating "trainers" to participate
in ongoing conscious Open Space within the theme of developing
the program and within the following five Givens:
1. The 3 foundational beliefs as noted above
2. Requirement to use the Workbooks developed by Birgitt
and Ward Williams
3. There are 11 components of the Genuine Contact™
program as noted above
4. Limited givens, maximum choice and participation
5. Limited external consultant involvement with maximum
skill and capacity building
6. To be considered a GCP professional, a person must
be continually opening space for his/her further and deeper learning.
He/she also keeps up with the essence of the evolution of the
GC work. The main source of the co-creation of any developments
is our mentoring circles...
- GC listserv
- Open Space Online conferences
- Annual GC mentoring circle
- Individual country mentoring circles
- Wellness (R)Evolution for Organizations Ezine
The overall goal is to have the Genuine Contact™ program
make a life nurturing difference in the world.
