October 5th, 2007 — learning
Inventing the future—together
Are you maximizing your team’s collective intelligence? Are turf-wars harming your organization’s ability to innovate and change? Is your intellectual capital underused?
Change forces organizations to be agile and innovative. Thriving organizations recognize and use their webs of distributed and co-creative intelligence because only the agile will prosper.
Action Learning Labs team coaching is a vehicle for development and change. Our unique group process addresses: agility, adaptation, co-creation, divergence, instability, conflict, purpose, and action.
Our coaching method is easy to incorporate, but also empowering. Action Learning Labs team coaching is for people who must collaborate to invent, share knowledge, share experience, and share perspectives. Team members gain a vantage point from which new and agile behaviors emerge.
New perspectives often uncover previously hidden possibilities—options for action. Participants will gain a new and more flexible approach to leadership, innovation, and change. Whether you need performance improvement, group agility, or you’re organization is in the midst of complete systems change, please contact Mitch Saunders.
Leadership teams must invent the future—not be victims of it.
(831) 335 7713
September 25th, 2007 — learning
How do you approach an unseen future?
As a leader, the pressure is on. The buck stops with you. You need to be decisive. You need to lead.
Your team looks to you for direction, expertise, and authority. But where do you go to test your perceptions? And how do you challenge your assumptions? And what do you do when you discover some of those assumptions are wrong?
Our coaching method is for pioneers like you. When you face conflict, when your situation is complex and unstable, then our coaching expertise will help you adapt to new realities. You’ll gain a new perspective on your situation. You’ll uncover previously hidden possibilities—options for action. You’ll have space and help to incubate ideas and bold, new moves—in private.
Whether you need performance improvement, personal agility, or you’re in the midst of a radical change for yourself or your organization, please contact Mitch Saunders.
[See also team coaching.]
(831) 335 7713
September 22nd, 2007 — learning
The Action Learning Labs System
Our unique approach is based on a practical way to understand and influence leadership, complex organizations and change. Any organization or system undergoes a developmental process with discrete stages in its life cycle. Each stage has properties defining it with its own potential risks, dangers and opportunities. Yet each stage is in conflict with others. Experiencing and understanding this life-cycle model, with its stages and transitions between stages, is foundational to our approach.
Why we approach problems differently
While simplicity and the quick fix may seem appealing, complex systems resist simple solutions. A band-aid solution can hinder change by hiding the real way forward.
Instead of searching for problems to fix, our first objective is to identify the stage the person or system is in now. We need to understand what is happening, or “trying to happen.” From this vantage point we can see more clearly (often surprising) opportunities.
Sustainable responses
We explore impulses for change and growth appropriate for the system’s developmental stage. Then we facilitate change using action learning, experimentation, and practice to develop sustainable responses to tough questions and high stakes transitions.
Our pedigree
Action Learning Labs is based on over twenty years of inquiry into leadership, innovation, and change, including ground-breaking research at the Organizational Learning Center at MIT. Our newest offerings are the result of a three-year-long intensive action research project, funded by the John F. Fetzer Institute in collaboration with, Global Project on Negotiation at Harvard University, Internet Infrastructure Platform Group, Hewlett-Packard, Formative Assessments Division, CTB/McGraw-Hill, and the National League of Cities/William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Individuals and organizations facing critical crossroads can now benefit from the latest research into change, innovation, and leadership.
(831) 335 7713
September 21st, 2007 — learning
Why social innovators turn to us
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Client
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The Wall
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Breakthrough
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Ball Foundation
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School-district leaders reported recurring inability to resolve K-12 educational dilemmas at the local level.
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Created simulations boosting capacity for transforming conflicts under conditions similar to those back home.
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California State University
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Base closures created an opportunity for civilian reuse of resources.
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Cross-functional leadership forum facilitated conversion of Fort Ord into an innovative public university in Monterey, California.
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Grand Junction Healthcare Dialogue
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Sub-optimization of the regional healthcare system due to misguided competition.
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Formed a more seamless system of care for Western Colorado due to leadership collaboration.
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Global Project On Negotiation at Harvard University
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Leading practitioners realized that contemporary theory and practice for conflict negotiation fell short when applied to the prevention of civil war in places like Venezuela, Indonesia, and Liberia.
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Evolved a new theory and practice emphasizing local capability for preventing and transforming conflicts in the Middle East.
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Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
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Funders threatened to withdraw support of long-term successful venture as founders prepared for retirement.
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Funders renewed support and developed a realistic future vision.
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(831) 335 7713
September 17th, 2007 — learning
A new way to uncover emerging possibilities
Action Learning Labs offers a new method of understanding and creating change for leaders, organizations, and individuals.
How can we adapt to a future we can’t see? How do we proceed when complex situations resist easy answers? What happens when we realize our old models no longer apply?
Leadership and innovation matter. You need a unique view of your situation from which to see opportunities. Organizations, leaders and individuals benefit from our action-oriented co-creative approach because it leads to new and agile behaviors essential to survival and success in today’s dynamic environment.
When it’s time to discover and develop what’s next, start here.
