Group and Organisational Consultancy

Many organisations stand or fall on the basis of team work, positive leadership and enlightened hierarchy. Working with the underlying conflicts or sup-plots in a group clears the air and creates a firm foundation for building a healthy work environment. We offer facilitated group work and practical tools to improve the quality of relationships within departments and throughout the organisation as a whole.

We offer an innovative approach to working with groups and organizations.

The ability of an organisation to work creatively with its moments of turbulence and chaos reflects its capacity for change management and development. In contrast, organisations that are unable to tolerate diversity and to work creatively run the risk of stagnating and getting stuck. We offer a participatory and experiential method for helping groups create their own structures and work goals, as well as giving skills for addressing chronic conflict areas, leadership issues, change processes and other organisation and community issues.

Teaching Skills for Organisations & Community Development-a curriculum for managers, leaders & professionals

This programme is suitable for all those working within an organisation, community or team-based setting. Using a modular approach of facilitated meetings and skills-based experiential learning, the programme aims to teach the skills needed to create enjoyable and constructive group life.

An Individualised Approach

The aim of the programme is to provide practical and experiential skills to enable the group to do what they might already doing but with greater ease and more awareness. We believe that all groups have an inherent wisdom that needs to be discovered, rather than imposing an outside system or model upon its members.

We believe that the most effective model of organisational development is based upon peer supervision and skills based experiential learning. We aim to coach individuals within their own organisations to become participating facilitators, enabling each group to ultimately self-supervise and embody a creative culture of mutual support and group enhancement.

By facilitating the organisation to discover its own methods of leadership and management, it will, with ease, implement its own structures and style of relationship that is best suited to meets its goals and targets.

Members of an organisation are often submerged within the complex task of striving to achieve targets and goals. However they can easily find themselves distracted from these tasks by undercurrents or ‘niggles’ that occur - mostly within the relationship life of the group. Our organisational curriculum sees such disturbances not only as normal but also as desirable, as they can hold useful information for the creative potential of the organisation. However, without the necessary skills and facilitated awareness to unfold such disturbances, it is difficult to bring out this creative potential, bringing the life of an organisation to a standstill. Meetings become at best lengthy and tedious, or at worst full of conflict and explosive scenes.

The programme

This is a powerful diagnostic and solution-focused tool for providing that missing link between the goals and tasks of the organisation, and the emotional undercurrents of the relational life of the members of the group. We teach skills that are specifically targeted to the needs and demands of each team or group.

Specific areas of the programme include:

• Leadership and rank issues and practice in becoming a participating leader.
• Identifying key roles and responsibilities in the group, as well as the un-named or ghost roles that exist in background atmospheres and disturbances.
• Methods for resolving interpersonal conflicts and team dynamics in such a way as to bring new and creative possibilities into the group.
• Enabling each member of the organisation to develop a voice and feeling of empowerment, knowing that unless the group functions as a whole system difficulties will arise.

Creating, with the organisation, a purpose made tool kit so that members can self-supervise and take on their own consultancy expertise. This is done in an ongoing way during each module, using a mix of exercises, practice, explanation and theory.

In addition, in certain situations we have found it useful to train a subgroup of individuals who are interested to take on the responsibility within their organisation to provide support for the rest of the group with the ongoing facilitation and peer supervision between modules. We can provide this sub group support and coaching between modules.

In general we recommend teaching blocks on a quarterly basis, with homework and experiential assignments to be practiced in between and during allocated meetings.