"That Was Great!": More High Impact Exercises For Teaching Or Consulting On Organizational Change 12
A two-hour interactive Academy of Management Annual meeting PDW workshop in Vancouver, Friday, August 5, 10:30am-12.30pm
Anaheim Marriott, Northwest Marquis Ballroom
Do you teach, research, or have an interest in organizational change?
For the 12th consecutive year, we offer a PDW to provide a forum for educators, researchers and consultants to showcase high impact methods for teaching organizational change in its many contexts (undergraduate, EMBA, MBA, corporate training, consulting). The workshop covers high impact classic and contemporary exercises that receive very positive responses in change programs. Two key features underpin this workshop:
- The workshop has a "hands-on" approach where participants get to experience, in part, the actual exercise or activity being undertaken.
- The teaching philosophy underpinning the workshop is a "multiple perspectives" approach which assumes that a variety of approaches, assumptions and methodologies may be employed to explore the many areas associated with organizational change.
Presenters will introduce their exercise, provide the audience with a short, hands-on sampling of it and the method for debriefing it, and will provide more detailed take away notes.
1. Keith Hunter (U. San Francisco) and Gary Wagenheim (Simon Fraser U.) will facilitate Shuffled Squares, an interactive and entertaining exercise designed to promote learning about how shifts in perception can support the accomplishment of shared goals. The goal of the exercise is for group members to assemble a limited number of differently shaped fragments into squares. Obtaining fragments that can be formed into a square requires exchange among group members under a set of rules that require participants to consider multiple perspectives, constraints and implications that come with interconnection. The facilitator will use the exercise to help participants learn about delivering learning outcomes related to individual and group decision making, group dynamics, and communication as well as explore the exercise's potential for classroom or client use.
2. Susan Resnick West and Cindy Martinez (U. Southern California) will present Community Maze, an experiential learning exercise used for Communicating Strategy and Change. The exercise helps teams explore the interdependent nature of complex systems, experience barriers to team learning, and identify the potential effects of mental models. Community Maze requires groups to plan and decide on the sequence (there is only one right and safe path) and then each member of the team takes turns in silence moving from one end of the maze to the other before times run out.
3. Susan Adams and Tony Buono (Bentley University) will present Reducing Resistance: Leveraging Differences in Intelligence. The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate ways to reach different types of audiences to create commitment to change. The exercise begins with each group member drawing a card that describes an audience that is resisting change. Next, participants are divided into different groups -- one of which is asked to role play how to influence (i.e., change the minds) of the specified audiences by leveraging the dominant types of intelligences of their audiences while others in the group respond as that particular audience typically would. Debriefing reviews tactics that are more useful for different types of orientations/intelligences and different sized groups to create commitment versus compliance to the desired change.
4. Ann Feyerherm (Pepperdine U.) will present Troika Consulting. This exercise is used for students learning consulting skills, coaching skills, or enrolled in organization behavior or organization development classes. It is a methodology for helping participants gain clarity on a challenge facing them, and as such is a method for one's own problem-solving as well as teaching a method for others to problem solve. It would be excellent for students who are in learning groups as a means to advance their own learning.
5. Gavin Schwarz (UNSW), Richard Dunford (U. Newcastle), and Ian Palmer (RMIT U) will lead all presenters in a discussion of How to Effectively Debrief High Impact Exercises focusing on outcomes for organizational change teaching and consulting.
No pre-registration is neccesary to attend the session.
For information on the session contact Gavin Schwarz (g.schwarz@unsw.edu.au).