Moving U

Moving U – A Theory U Workshop to Transform your Team

In the face of a tidal wave of new thinking about decision-making, leadership, strategy and innovation, some businesses and many individual managers and leaders know that things need to change radically. Piecemeal change is not enough. Teams, divisions and entire organisations must reinvent themselves. Somewhere in this tidal wave (some of it incomprehensible, some unthinkable) lies the solution. Embodying Mindfulness in Organisational Decision-Making Managing the Organisational Shadow Side You’re probably familiar with many of these terms and their Myth and Story Telling in Business creators: Peter Senge, Daniel Goleman, Charles Handy, Fritjof Self-Transcending Knowledge Capra, Warren Bennis, Gary Hamel, Otto Scharmer and others… Transformational Leadership But do you have the time, skills and resources to implement Organisational Intelligence any of them? In our experience, if you’re going to get to grips Organisational Awareness with them you need to have the skills of a: Transformational Enquiry Negotiator ~ Psychotherapist ~ Meditator ~ Coach ~ Mediator ~ Wisdom in Organisations The T-Shaped Enterprise Charismatic ~ NLP master ~ Theatre director ~ Clairvoyant Learning Organisations The Triple Bottom Line Bodies in Business can’t give you all these skills. Nor can we distil Aesthetics in Business the collected wisdom of all the writers and theories mentioned here to Emotional Intelligence single out the solution to your team’s particular concerns or challenges. Participative Enquiry What we can do at a Moving U workshop is to help you set in motion The Fifth Discipline the process of transforming the whole way your team works together. Servant Leadership Complexity Theory The process we follow is, broadly speaking, that of Otto Scharmer’s Theory U. Clumsy Solutions Systems Thinking In this process we emphasise ‘the social field’ – which is the wider environment. Situated Learning We shift attention away from the individual, the group or the organisation Spiritual Enquiry and become aware of each individual present in the group, of the group in the Neuroleadership organisation and of the organisation in its social, cultural and physical environment. Open Innovation Triarchy Theory While we will think and talk about this process, the main vocabulary that Cultural Theory we use is that of movement. Not dancing or acrobatics but walking, sitting, Action Enquiry arriving, leaving, leaning, lying. Simple movements that we all perform every Synchronicity day. Why do we use movement? Our experience is that it will often bypass our Stewardship usual thoughts, ideas and prejudices. It opens possibilities and offers an effective Presencing way of changing our habitual patterns of thinking, relating and working together. Phronesis Theory U [For more on Theory U, see www.theoryu.com]

Who are the workshops for? Our workshops are designed for a team (which may be a board of directors or a project team or a regular work team) who work together closely and consistently (though they may be geographically widespread) – so that the team will together attend the workshop and together build on it afterwards. You may be facing a particular problem or set of challenges or you may simply be looking for new resources for dealing with the usual challenges. You may be up against the wall in the economic crisis and needing innovative thinking to save your business. Or you may be finding recurring problems in working together. Or you may find that, as a team, you’re feeling stuck or running out of energy. Or you may be hugely successful and still wanting to innovate.

What happens? Of course, much of what happens is up to you. But, using the structures of Theory U, we invite you to: • Witness yourself, your condition and your situation – simply slowing down, experiencing how things are without jumping to conclusions or bringing any previous judgements to bear • Let go of established habits, patterns and prejudices • Open mind, heart and will to sense ‘how it is’ and ‘how it could be’ • Use Presencing to widen potential and turn letting go into letting come • Crystallise vision and intention This workshop will help you address issues in new ways; if you’re facing intractable problems, it will help you work together at a deeper level to resolve them. We use movement alongside Theory U and Presencing to help us access resources that we might tend to discount in the working environment. Depending on your starting point, this process may seem necessary and obvious or ridiculous claptrap. We will simply ask you to try it anyway. Then we suggest you take the process back to your workplace and just keep practising it.

Why Bodies in Business?

We are not Accenture or PwC. But the kind of change we’re talking about requires transformational thinking, practices and structures. The old order may not be best placed to deliver that kind of transformation. Our experience brings together a range of skills: Joy Kearney has worked as a management and OD consultant for 20 years. She designs and delivers senior management development programmes and works closely with senior teams in FTSE 500 companies and in the NHS. Her specialities include facilitation, teambuilding, change management, coaching and negotiation skills. Joy is also a Registered Dance Movement Psychotherapist and works with myth and gestalt.

Andrew Carey has been writing about organisation, management and leadership theory since 1983. He led a teambuilding company (The Elephant of Surprise) for several years, works as a psychotherapist and is a publisher at Triarchy Press (whose authors include Russ Ackoff, John Seddon and Michael Thompson). He recently wrote an account of the Project Red Stripe innovation programme at The Economist.

Sandra Reeve is a movement artist, teacher, Senior Registered Dance Movement Psychotherapist and director. She lectures on movement, leads workshops on her Move into Life practice, works with groups, individuals and organisations to help them expand their movement vocabulary. Her work and recent PhD on The Ecological Body draw on Buddhist mindfulness principles, Javanese Amerta movement and Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘poor theatre’.

What’s the deal? We’ve developed the 3-day Moving U workshop to help your team transform itself. Before we sell it, we’d like to prototype it. So we give our time and skills free of charge and ask you to give your time, open minds and constructive reaction free of charge. You leave the workshop having crystallised the possibility of transformation in your team. We get invaluable feedback to help us take the workshop to other (paying!) clients.

Interested? Please visit:

www.BodiesinBusiness.org [email protected] ~ 07860 261355 (Joy) ~ 01297 560511 (Sandra)