Why Agile and Other Forms of Collaborative Organizing Fail, and What to Do About It

This session will describe the results of 30 years of research and consulting to understand why successful collaborative organizations revert to command and control and describe experiences from the past 20 years of implementing the Clear Leadership method in organizations around the world. In one published study, Palomar Health, a San Diego health care organization with 2.5 billion in annual revenues, used Clear Leadership to increase employee engagement from the 61st to 91st percentile of all health care organizations in America. You will learn a tool, The Experience Cube, that has been used by thousands of managers to create organizations where real partnership and engagement flourishes and you will understand the underlying psychological processes required for successful leadership of collaborative work.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the psychological processes that make it so difficult for well-intentioned, motivated people to sustain collaborative workplaces.
• Discover the competencies and developmental lessons necessary for managers and consultants to lead collaboratively.
• Learn a tested process for building the foundations for collaboration required for use of all other 21st century organization change processes.

About the Facilitator:

Gervase (pronounced Jervis) Bushe is the Professor of Leadership and Organization Development at the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. His career spans four decades of transforming organizational structures, cultures and processes away from command and control toward more collaborative work systems. He is an award-winning author of over 100 papers and four books on organizational change, leadership, teams and teamwork. Gervase has consulted to blue chip corporations and start-ups, public sector and business corporations, in a variety of sectors, using highly collaborative processes of inquiry to create transformational change. His recent book, Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change, co-edited with Robert Marshak (2015) builds on his ground-breaking research into processes of generative leadership and change, and has garnered international acclaim. His latest book, The Dynamics of Generative Change (2020), offers a practical alternative to traditional planned change, better aligned with the needs for agility and engagement in today’s organizations. Since 2016 HR Magazine in the UK has identified him as one of the 30 most influential HR Thinkers. In the last ranking he was 12th. A chapter on his life and work appears in the Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers. For more information and links to his papers go to www.gervasebushe.ca.

Global OD Competency Framework: This session is related to the Systems Change Expert, and Informed Consultant competencies