"That Was Great!" 7: More High Impact Exercises For Teaching Or Consulting On Organizational Change
A two-hour interactive Academy of Management Annual meeting PDW workshop in Montreal, Friday, August 12, 11:45AM - 1:45PM
Location: Grand Hyatt – Lone Star B (Program Session #82)
Do you teach, research, or have an interest in organizational change?
For the seventh 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. Gary Wagenheim (Simon Fraser U.) will present will present an experiential activity that focuses on a fun highly interactive individual and group exercise-the Push Pull Leadership Exercise-to facilitate learning about leadership, goal achievement, and change. He will use the push pull leadership exercise to help participants learn the importance of goal clarity, communication, leadership styles, and cooperation in effectively managing change and achieving goals. Participants will have the opportunity to explore the push pull leadership exercise and discuss their learning and classroom application. Each participant will receive a copy of the push pull leadership exercise instructions.
2. Susan Adams (Bentley University) and Tony Buono (Bentley University) will present the exercise Gauging Personal Reaction to Change. The exercise involves a card game that provides participants with the opportunity to explore how they react to change, especially when new norms are not fully understood. The exercise helps participants examine how they act and feel when they are faced with situations where they do not fully know the rules or understand the norms. Debriefing focuses on what participants experienced and how they reacted to "new" rules, assumptions they made, whether they realized that the rules had changed, and what actions they took. The discussion will also focus on the experience of the presenters and variations in the exercise
3. Jeff Klem (Healthways) will present an interactive team exercise entitled the Helium Stick. This exercise is a simple, low tech experiential exercise involving a group of participants and a tent pole. The objective of the exercise is to discover how to best work as a team when a seemingly simple outcome becomes difficult to attain primarily because of the human element. Psychological and emotional reactions often exacerbate the problems in reaching the goal. The lessons for researchers and practitioners reside in when and how to anticipate challenges associated with new team formation in relation to a project/task and how to psychologically and emotionally prepare teams to manage those challenges.
4. Therese Yaeger (Benedictine University) presents the experiential exercise entitled Conflict among Generations Experiencing Change. This activity challenges participants' perceptions and biases toward different age groups in the workplace and/or classroom. Generational conflicts can cripple organizations, cause turnover, and diminish team productivity, yet we often are unaware how members from the other age groups receive and process our messages and information. This session helps participants learn the importance of how we approach change efforts, who is involved, one's unconscious age discrimination, and how, as academics we may even pre-judge our students based on their age (both young and older)..
5. Gavin Schwarz (U. New South Wales), Richard Dunford (U. Sydney), and Ian Palmer (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) 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 organizers Gavin Schwarz (g.schwarz@unsw.edu.au), Ian Palmer (Ian.Palmer@rmit.edu.au), or Richard Dunford (R.Dunford@econ.usyd.edu.au).