I help group and organisations to reconnect with ‘why are we here?’ ‘where are we going?’ and ‘what do we need to do to get there?’
I support organisations to deepen their ability to learn, improve and to work together more effectively. I help you to answer the question What is our impact? How can we learn from unintended consequences? and How can we achieve our purpose?
I help people to look at their situation in new ways, to critically evaluate the assumptions that underpin their work and to find the point of ‘flow’ when their work as a group comes together easily and creatively.
My role is twofold; to create a safe space or ‘container’ where people can take risks to think outside of the box, and to design a process that helps them consider things in new lights.
I prefer to facilitate group processes where we learn from each other and build collective understanding. This is because all research shows that the effectiveness of the group far outweighs that of any one individual.
I bring to this assignment my knowledge about
- Intra-personal mental models: Individual capacities, behaviour and processes that are associated with positive outcomes,
- Processes that underlie inter-personal interventions and the human capacity to anticipate, resist, cope, adapt and recover from adversity and thirdly,
- The nature of institutional arrangements that enhance self organisation and spark the human capacity to act collectively.
I combine this knowledge with the skills of listening deeply (both to what is and is not being explicitly said), helping people to use their multiple intelligences, creating a space for insights, patterns, actions and solutions to emerge, and bringing new perspectives to the group’s understanding.
Clients
Have included Concern Worldwide, ANSAF, Children in Crossfire and Search for Common Ground.
My approach
I use an integral framework analysis (Wilber, 2001) to underpin an examination of behavioural and social change. This examines the four universal quadrants of human existence. These are
- the internal interior – the subjective experience of the individual which manifests in their feelings, hopes and personal histories,
- the interior collective – which is the subjective experience of the group and shows up in social norms and values,
- the exterior individual – which is the observable behaviour of the individual,
- the exterior collective – which is the objective political economy.
In a development discourse that is so heavily influenced by Western thinking there is a tendency for most practitioners to look at the external aspects of human existence, those surface features that can be empirically observed. This ignores the internal reality of individuals and groups, which can only be understood by dialogue and through interpretation. Many change efforts fail because they ignore the internal forces that keep individuals in a state of stasis, and prevent them from becoming real agents of change in their lives. Additionally, it is impossible to understand what keeps people in extreme poverty if we fail to engage in understanding human development, rather than macro-economic development. Again, this is a limitation in current development discourse, but it is critical to understand where individuals lie developmentally – are they at the egocentric stage where they can only focus their attention on themselves and their families, or have they moved to a socio-centric stage of development where they can consider and empathise with others to the extent that they start to think developmentally? In a region where we can claim few developmental leaders, it is not sufficient to only consider how policies, and systems support or hinder development, but also to examine the interior worlds of those who hold the power to influence change.
Reflections:
McAlpine, K. (2010). Tool for assessing organisational value creation.