“The GSW_Conference.Lab 2021 will provide a space where diverse perspectives/experiences from artists, scientists, spiritual practitioners, and political activists will inspire participants to better understand and embody GSW within their mind, heart, and body.  Throughout the lab, we will co-create new ideas, strategies, tools, and energy to help us become mature global citizens in our times of disruption and transformation.” (https://www.globalsocialwitnessing.org/#row_gswlab)

Now through March 18, recorded dialogues are available for all conference participants. Listen in as Ilene Wasserman discusses “GSW and Inclusion: How do we go on together?”

Click HERE to learn more and register.

The 80th annual Meeting of the Academy of Management is happening virtually this year, from August 7th to 11th. Ilene Wasserman will be presenting as part of two different sessions, and we’d love to see you for either or both. Register for the meeting and explore the whole program here.

Find us at the following sessions:

From Founders to the Future: A 20/20 Look at Organization Development | Friday August 7th | 10am-12pm EST

In the mid-2000s, scholars were concerned that organization development may have become a dying field. Since then, others have studied a number of developments associated with OD, including discourse analysis, agility, coaching, appreciative inquiry, complexity theory, and dialogic OD, to name a few that surfaced in the late 2000s and 2010s. The emergence of these practices created for practitioners a tension between the legacy of the founders of OD focused on interpersonal relationships, groups and teams, and internal organization relationships, and the requests of clients for assistance in these new areas. Further, practices once part of OD work, such as organization design, coaching, project management, and change management, became the purview of other professionals. Last, the role of human resource professionals was changing from transactional to more strategic engagements in organizations that at times closely resembled OD work.

Both the extension of practices within the field of OD and the wide array of historic OD work now performed by HR and other professionals led to a sense of fragmentation in the OD field. This PDW presents the results of work by OD scholars and professionals during the Founders to the Future Project to both honor the past and recommend a coherent future for the field of OD. In an interactive setting, participants will provide feedback on reports in four areas provided to registrants prior to the conference: vision for the OD field, values for the future, competencies that will be needed, and a dynamic definition of OD.

Bridging Positive Organizational Scholarship and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion | Friday August 7th | 4pm-6pm EST

This session is targeted to scholars interested in the study of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from strengths-based approaches. The aim of this innovative PDW is to provide a forum for researchers to discover new forms of inquiry that will advance research on DEI within positive organizational scholarship (POS). Part of the workshop will include empirical research puzzles presented by DEI experts known for their work in this area. We will feature current empirical and theoretical work that explores positive processes and outcomes associated with diversity in organizations. We will then encourage participation from participants through roundtable discussions and report-outs.

Ideally, participants will be required to pre-register for the session and provide a brief summary on their interests at the nexus of DEI and POS, so that the organizers can assign them to an initial table based on the similarity of their interests of other participants and our facilitators. Participants will be asked to rotate to a new table following each panel presentation to allow cross-fertilization of ideas during the session. We will provide discussion questions for participants to reflect on theoretical, methodological, and practical puzzles they face in their own research and practice in DEI. Further, they will focus on collaboratively brainstorming how adopting a POS lens enhances their study of DEI topics, and how DEI research expands the study of POS. Participants will also consider the implications of empirical research on POS and DEI for individuals and organizations. The session will conclude with a report out on from each table and a summary of future directions presented by the organizing committee.

One significant way we make sense of our worlds is through the structure of stories. And our stories are understood through our frames of reference from family, community, and history. These stories influence what we hear and what we don’t hear, what we tell or don’t tell, and what we chose to edit. Stories are constituted by episodes. And we find grounding in those episodes having a beginning, middle, and end.

We find ourselves now in the middle of a number of powerful episodes that contain critical moments and how we chose to respond is especially consequential to the future we are creating. One of these episodes is the global pandemic and how different geographic regions are dealing with it. Another episode has been ignited by the outrage in response to the murder of George Floyd. How we frame the beginning, middle and end of the episodes that constitute each of these stories continues to shift as the beginnings or roots continue to unfold and the future we are creating is uncertain…

Read the rest of Ilene Wasserman’s post on the CMM Institute blog here