At the Genuine Contact Summer Academy 2024 participants took a deep dive into the Genuine Contact approach to Holistic Organizational Development
A piece of wisdom among indigenous peoples is to do your best for your generation and for seven generations to come. What principles, concepts, laws, and values are we working from as we take this wisdom on board, and put systems in place that are on the right track for now and for generations to come?
I was part of the sponsoring team of the Summer Academy 2024 that took place from June 24th until June 28th in Lunteren, the Netherlands. We provided an opportunity for leaders and consultants to explore what is needed to guide organizations through their ongoing evolution from a holistic perspective.
Constant change in the world and in organizations presents us with the challenge of how to lead into the unknown. Adopting a holistic organizational development approach is one way to meet this challenge. This approach has evolved over thirty years of experience, including with the international Genuine Contact Organization.
- Dear friends and colleagues in Genuine Contact,
- The Genuine Contact and its Holistic Organizational Development approach is intended to support you as you find your way going forward to be of service to humanity, leaders, organizations, and the planet. The Summer Academy includes the Holistic Organizational Development workshop, and is an experience of community that goes beyond the workshop. Relationships are created and strengthened, supported by common interest in the present and for the future.
- Birgitt
- Co -Founder of the Genuine Contact Program | Facilitator Summer Academy 2024
Find an In-Depth Description here
Explorations and Learnings
Throughout this learning program, the participants explored and learned:
- The dominant world view about organizations today, alternatives, and making a choice about your world view.
- Principles, whether explicit or implicit in the organization, their influence, and making a choice about the principles that seem best suited to you.
- Changing concepts and approaches about organizational development for the best future and making a choice about the concepts and approaches you adopt.
- Laws such as the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, and their implications in organizational development.
- Values that are meaningful to you to choose in order to anchor your organization and sustain its integrity through all change.
- Skills, knowledge, and capacity for developing an organization using a holistic organizational development approach.
- Simple multi-purpose tools from the Genuine Contact toolkit, to support your work using a holistic organizational development approach.
- A roadmap for your ideal organization using a holistic organizational development approach.
Method
The workshop was facilitated using the participatory whole systems method Whole Person Process Facilitation.
Participants found themselves in a variety of configurations, sometimes working in pairs, small groups, individually and in the group as a whole. Activities were designed for participants based on best adult learning practices. Questions were offered to stimulate reflections and conversations. Particpants entered a learning experience that tapped into a combination of playfulness with wisdom, engaging all learning styles.
Who attended
An international group of formal leaders, managers, and consultants who have roles in preparing the organization to adopt a holistic organizational development approach and leading with that intention in mind. Participants came from The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, France and Germany.
We welcomed everyone who identified as a stakeholder of the organization and was curious to learn about the holistic organizational development approach and the intended shift in the culture of the organization.
ABOUT THE FACILITATORS
This workshop is being designed and lead by Birgitt Williams and Rachel Bolton both Senior Consultants at Dalar International. Birgitt and Rachel are part of the founding group who developed the Genuine Contact approach and continue to be deeply involved together with the members of the Genuine Contact Organization, in bringing the Genuine Contact Way of working and living out into the world.
Birgitt Williams is an international management and organizational solutions consultant, author, meeting facilitator, teacher and executive coach.
Birgitt is the author of The Genuine Contact Way. Birgitt maintains that there is leadership capacity within everyone and that it is time for people to awaken their leadership potential. She teaches about leadership as a verb, action to be taken. She believes personal and professional leadership development cannot be separated. This book offers the reader the opportunity to take a deep dive into the subject of personal and professional leadership development. Readers are challenged to claim leadership of their lives and their businesses and organizations for the greater well-being of all, including our children and grandchildren. Readers are offered the opportunity to read a segment, reflect, discuss, and determine what makes sense for them in their personal and professional leadership, as individuals and as teams.
She has worked with health care professionals including researchers in Nigeria, India, Indonesia, Australia, Ethiopia, the UK, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, the USA, Sweden, and Germany. She has been a mentor and executive coach to leaders and to senior organizational development consultants in Armenia, Australia, Austria, Cameroon, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Korea, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, UK, USA, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, and Uganda.
Rachel has been a member of the Dalar team since 1998 including more than a decade as the Production Director and in this role played integral part of the team at Dalar during the co-founding of the Genuine Contact™ Program. Today, she carries out her work as senior consultant and facilitator focusing on, meeting facilitation, strategic planning, leadership development and organizational development work. Most of her work is carried out online, for clients around the globe, using her skillfulness in meeting the needs of multi-cultural organizations.
Rachel favors taking on assignments that are complex, getting great joy out of unraveling the threads of the complexity to assist clients find elegant yet simple solutions. She loves helping her clients find the best path forward for themselves at this time, with a perspective of helping them be the best version of themselves, individually and as an organization. She makes the complex simple.
Rachel is also the Director of the international Genuine Contact Organization, a global community of more than a thousand consultants, coaches, leaders, and facilitators whose work is rooted in the Genuine Contact way of working. Under her leadership as Director, the organization is growing and evolving including transforming itself at present to a membership organization.
The internationalGenuine Contact Organization carries its work out in a number of countries with consistent results cross-culturally. A multicultural group now co-owns the Genuine Contact program and leads its ongoing development through their own ‘walking their talk’ as an organization in relation to what the professionals teach. Rachel has been a Co-Owner of the program since 2007.
ABOUT THE SPONSORING TEAM
Mariëlle Cuijpers, Doris Gottlieb, Richard Metcalf and Yolanda van der Hooft are part of a growing group of professionals in the Netherlands engaged in the Genuine Contact Way of working. Each of us apply the powerful frameworks, methods, and principles of Genuine Contact to our diverse work environments that include work: Inside organizations and as external consultants. Working in the private sector and in public organizations. Two of us having been born in the Netherlands and two of us who make our home here but come from other countries. All of us are dedicated to bringing the powerful approach offered by Genuine Contact into the Netherlands and are part of a developing Hub of people who are working and living the Genuine Contact way.