A Holistic Approach to Organizational Development

The Invitation

Leaders and consultants benefit from taking a time out, to sit back, and to assess what they are creating for the future. Just as with looking in the rearview mirror when driving a car, looking back to find the best way forward is limited. A wisdom from Indigenous peoples is to do your best for your generation and for seven generations to come. This leads to a question that needs to be answered: “What principles, concepts, laws and values are you working from as you put a system in place that is on the right track for now and for generations to come?”

Constant change in the world and in the organization makes it challenging to lead into the unknown. Adopting a holistic organizational development approach is one way to meet this challenge. Those attending this workshop can determine if it is the approach they wish to adopt, as leaders and as consultants providing guidelines to leaders and their organizations.

What to expect

Throughout this learning program, you will explore, create and learn:

• The dominant worldview about organizations today, alternatives, and making a choice about your worldview
• Principles, whether explicit or implicit in the organization, their influence, and making a choice about the principles that seem best suited to you
• Changing concepts and approaches about organizational development for the best future and making a choice about the concepts and approaches for you to adopt
• Laws such as the whole being greater than the sum of the parts and the implications in organizational development
• Values that are meaningful to you to choose to anchor your organization to sustain its integrity through all change
• Skills, knowledge and capacity for developing an organization using a holistic organizational development approach
• Simple multi-purpose tools from the Genuine Contact toolkit to support your work using a holistic organizational development approach
• A roadmap for your ideal organization using a holistic organizational development approach

Holistic organizational development the Genuine Contact Way provides an opportunity to explore what you need to consider to guide leaders and their organizations through their evolution. We have had thirty years of experience working from a Holistic Organizational Development approach. This has evolved for us over time and through experience including with the international Genuine Contact Organization.

Why Use This Approach?

Using a holistic organizational development approach ensures that you are creating a balanced system in your organization, a system that can quickly rebalance itself when it gets out of balance. The natural state of all of us and our organizations is a state of well-being. A holistic organizational development approach helps our organizations and communities to get back on track with this state of well-being, in alignment with a harmonious life nourishing reality. When we are in well-being, harmony, and experiencing life-nourishing conditions, we make better, even best, choices and decisions individually and collectively. Alternately, when we are not in our well-being, harmony, experiencing life-depleting (toxic) conditions, individually and collectively, we are not in the right conditions for making choices and decisions for creating and evolving our best future.

A holistic organizational development approach includes the seen world and the unseen world for the gathering of information, synthesizing information, and acting on it. The seen world is determined by our five traditionally accepted senses of touch, taste, sight, hearing, smell. These provide us with an understanding of the world that might be perceived as reality. The unseen world, just as important, is understood through other senses of the multi-sensory makeup of humans including intuition, love, imagination, telepathy and the human spirit to name a few. When the unseen world information is added to the seen world information, different understanding emerges that offers a more whole perspective.

From a holistic approach, working consciously with the whole instead of fragments of this whole, the organization is better able to live the answers it has to three important questions “why am I?”, “who am I?”, and “where am I going?”. The answers to all three, for an organization, are vitally important to a solid foundation from which it can grow.

There is no singular definition or approach to using a holistic organizational development approach. In this workshop, we offer the holistic organizational development approach that is based in the Genuine Contact Way of leading, working, and living. It is offered as an example from which participants will develop their choices about their holistic organizational development approach.

Who Needs to be Involved?

Formal leaders, managers, and consultants have clear roles in preparing the organization to adopt developing itself from a holistic organizational development approach and leading the organizational development with that intention in mind.

Ideally, everyone who identifies as a stakeholder of the organization are oriented to the holistic organizational development approach and the intended shift in the culture of the organization. Skill, knowledge and capacity is needed for the people to adopt a holistic way of operating as an organization for the benefit of individuals and the whole organization.

How Does it Work?

Learning in this module is offered through 6 phases of learning, based on the Evolutionary Spiral. One of the multi-use tools that make up the Genuine Contact Toolkit, the Evolutionary Spiral offers a roadmap of your learning and development. Every phase provides the tools. tips and guidance for your exploration of Holistic Organizational Development and a next step in your personal and professional leadership development.

• Discernment: You will begin by establishing working definitions that capture your perceptions of what Holistic Organizational Development is and is not. Through art and nature, you’ll establish your concept of an ideal organization or culture, developing clarity about what you assume and believe regarding organizational development.
• Readiness: In this turn of the wheel, you will learn what you’ll need to do to ensure sufficient readiness in an organization for undergoing an organizational transformation to a holistic organizational development approach.You will be presented with five beliefs for the purpose of considering their implications for your holistic organizational development perspective considering what is internal to an organization and within the performance environment of complexity and constant change.You’ll be guided in developing a readiness checklist complete with actions that you can take towards readiness for the strategic planning.holistic organizational development.
• Engagement: You will be taken through a series of activities to engage you with principles, concepts, laws and values to support holistic organizational development. You’ll increase your confidence and capacity for leading holistic organizational development. In this turn of the wheel, you will learn the tools that you will use during construction of a roadmap for holistic organizational development starting from where you are now, and moving to where you want to be with an organization.
• Construction: In this turn of the wheel, you’ll develop your roadmap based on the choices you have made in relation to the guidance, tools, tips and insights that took place during the workshop in you and in others, all that you have learned about holistic organizational development. You’ll come through this phase with increased competency in leading an organization to develop itself using holistic organizational development.
• Implementation: In this turn of the wheel, you will devise a presentation for a team, orienting them to holistic organizational development. The presentation will include what will be expected of them as individuals and as teams to support the organizational development within a culture of development in the organization.
• Monitoring and Adjustment: You’ll look at the difference between performance management and monitoring & adjustment. Using role play, in this turn of the wheel, you will work out what monitoring needs to include and why. You’ll learn what is needed for rebalancing an organization back to its well-being when it gets out of balance.