JLTalley & Associates

Seminars

These topics are offered as 2-hr, no-fee discussion sessions. I will typically present a framework I have found useful, and then invite criticism, edits, and reflection from the participants. If you have 10+ interested people, let me know and we can schedule a session. I periodically offer a cluster of seminars to everyone on my mailing list.

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Every consulting engagement has its unique challenges, so it is appropriate that consultants' behavior varies widely as well. But underneath the variety there is (or ought to be) a basic process model. It is useful to articulate the consulting process, even if only to organize our reflections on the core features of our practice. During this session, I will present my attempt to capture the elements common to any client engagement. I hope it will prompt you to share your insights about our work.

AUDIENCE: Targeted to practicing consultants who want to better understand the basis for our often intuitive choices of how to work with clients. Also useful for new consultants with deep expertise in organizational dynamics but uncertain how to bring those learnings to their clients.

For those somewhat new to the field, this graphic map of the field of organizational development may provide a useful exploration of possible career paths. It encapsulates all the various activities I have noticed in my OD colleagues over the last several decades. It highlights the wide variety of the ways we help organizations.

Assessing or changing an organization presumes we understand the anatomy of our subject. Organizations are particularly complex, so this model outlines all the pieces and parts that make up a company. There are both structural and behavioral components, and there is a mix of intentional and emergent elements. So we consultants need a richer map of the terrain to help our clients see what they might otherwise miss.

In most employee surveys, we ask a lot of questions of almost everyone; this tutorial outlines several other strategies that dramatically improve the impact and value of an employee survey and often take less effort overall.

Organizational change management has become a veritable commodity in the field of OD. People proudly claim it as their specialty, as if managing change was not a factor of any OD intervention. And yet the practice of "OCM" leaves much to be desired. This presentation provides a slight modification to the concept and suggests a new strategy for addressing "resistance".

Most strategic plans do not fail, they just fade away. The press of older agendas and the uncertainty of how to take on new work makes strategic initiatives too fragile to survive. This seminar suggests the missing step to infusing new directions into the everyday work. It also outlines the concept of a MacroMap, which maps all the work processes of an organization on a single page. The net result is the entire staff can talk about the entire enterprise, which is the needed conversation for strategic planning that sticks.

The field of process improvement has helped businesses to refocus their attention on the nature of work. But looking at individual processes will eventually push you to look for a process characterization of the whole enterprise. A MacroMap captures the work of an entire organization on one page (sometimes a big page, but one page nonetheless). The format proposed in this seminar goes beyond the common generic representations of organizations and offers a way to capture the unique features of a particular company without overwhelming the audience with detail. The net result is that a large group of staff can intelligently discuss the entire enterprise to identify problem areas, set priorities, and improve integration of effort.