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New Futures' Approach to Process Design and Facilitation
New Futures' director, Don Dunoon, practises within a tradition
of process consultation and organisational learning and change management
that goes back 30 years or more.
This approach to organisational development and improvement aims
to strengthen the capacity of the organisation or group to deal
more productively with its own issues.
The style of working takes as given that within the organisation
there will usually be the necessary intelligence and experience
to analyse problems and devise solutions.
What the organisation needs is help with the process aspects, to
enable this organisational know-how to be productively utilised.
We are yet to come across an organisation where this proposition
does not hold.
There is no step-by-step methodology to be followed: it is more
a case of tailoring a strategy to the specific circumstances. But
the general theme involves drawing out underlying issues in ways
that can enable the organisation to work with them, while minimising
defensiveness and threat. Perhaps we can best illustrate what this
means in practice with some examples of our work:
- We assisted a state government agency to review a failed major
IT systems project, in ways that enabled the groups involved to
understand what went wrong and learn from their experience, so
that the organisation would not make similar mistakes again.
- In conjunction with another consultant, we assisted a consortium
of eleven organisations to put aside many differences and focus
their joint efforts on establishing a new Cooperative Research
Centre. Subsequently (and beyond the time of our involvement)
the organisation was successful in attracting Commonwealth funding.
- We assisted a leading independent school to develop and implement
a high involvement process for reviewing its curriculum. Following
the success of this project we subsequently helped the school
develop and put in place a process for involving people in rebuilding
the school's professional development function, previously a source
of much dissatisfaction.
- We enabled one government agency to identify the causes of deep
problems in its dealings with its major customer and to substantially
improve the relationship.
- New Futures assisted one property development corporation to
uncover the dynamics that were causing individual functions to
'trip over' one another in their dealings with customers and stakeholders.
The organisation experienced a greater degree of teamwork and
alignment of effort as a result of the intervention.
Gathering data on stakeholder perceptions is often an important
input to organisational development and improvement processes, and
we work with a partner using web-based survey methods (www.owlbusiness.com.au).
With its emphasis on capacity building, process consultation is
an alternative, and more value adding, approach compared to the
traditional method of bringing in a consultant as 'expert' to develop
and recommend a solution.
Advantages include a greater sense of ownership for change, opportunities
for employees to develop and gain leadership skills, an unlocking
of energy and enthusiasm - and lower cost.
Contact New Futures to discuss, without
obligation, how a process-based approach might help your organisation
deal with difficult issues and better achieve its goals.
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