Volume 8, Issue 1, Year 08
Practicing OD focuses on practice. Short, easy-to-read articles give you great ideas you can use tomorrow! Share your own best practices by submitting an article for possible publication. Full access to this bi-monthly e-zine is one of the many benefits of membership in the OD Network.
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Uncovering the Seven Simple Truths to High Performance
Jason Wolf
Jason Wolf kicks off this issue with a profound message to help us all - what creates high performance is not that complicated! Sharing the results of an extensive study at HCA (Health Care of America) to uncover the drivers of high performance, he summarizes seven key findings that together, outline a path to high performance. In fact, in the HCA study, the high performers, practicing the "seven simple truths", had significantly higher employee engagement and margins and lower turnover. This is not saying they are easy to accomplish, just that understanding what to do is not rocket science!
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Facilitation is More Than Running Good Meetings
Matt Minahan
Matt has contributed other insightful pieces to Practicing in the past and again has captured a valuable perspective on facilitation. While the popular managerial understanding of facilitation is often limited to "running good meetings", most of us involved in OD know better. Facilitation actually involves a wide range of conceptual perspectives, thought processes and skill sets. In this article, he outlines one such perspective that always serves facilitators well ... thinking in multiple levels and recognizing that we facilitate on multiple levels. There are simultaneous dynamics and processes occurring within individuals, between participants at the meeting, across the whole group and related to the organization itself. Attention to and planning for these various levels of work are essential for good facilitation.
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GET THE PICTURE?
Hudson Whitenight
In the spirit of expanding our use of methods and facilitating better results, Hud Whitenight offers both a valuable method to consider using and also an insightful perspective for sustaining results and capturing emotions that have meaning for teams. Taking pictures or videos of team building allows for a way to capture critical moments, dialogues or results in ways that can be more easily accessed again in future follow up activities. In the same way that the family photo album contains embedded emotions related to the pictures, so too could teams resurface important feelings, commitments and interactions through the use of visual media. In ways that are similar to, but go beyond, graphic facilitation, visual documenting of teams can enhance sustainable results. Perhaps, "a picture is worth a thousand words".
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