Context, Context, Context: How Our Blindness to Context Cripples Even the Smartest Organizations

Oshry, a specialist in human systems thinking who has developed educational programs and training for organizations, uses a dialogue to describe how an organization struggled to achieve excellence and deal with blindness to systemic contexts, and the impact on on stalling change programs, undermining communication, sabotaging teamwork, and creating divisions. The dialogue explains how contexts shape experiences; how different roles in an organization, as well as that of the customer, have different contexts and create challenges; how each part of a system has a unique contribution; and how to put whole systems in context and become aware of contexts. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation ©2018 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
It's well known that human beings are allergic to change. This is nowhere more true than of human beings in organizations. Organization Development initiatives, Leadership Development programs, and Business Transformation plans all founder too often on our resistance and reluctance, on the tendency of people and things to slip back to how they were before. For a long time, Systems Thinkers in general (and Power+Systems pioneer Barry Oshry in particular) have understood that the problem lies with our failure to look at the surrounding organizational structures and dynamics, at the wider picture, at the context. Barry Oshry draws on a lifetime's experience to explain the nature of the problem with our organizational structures, and the ways in which we can dissolve the problem. This book is written in play-form: a simple briefing conversation between a recently hired team member and the Chief Contextual Thinker for a Business Consultancy firm. They discuss the change initiative they are running for a key client. The conversational format allows Oshry to introduce the relevant theory clearly and in sequence, while addressing questions and misunderstandings as they arise. The result is a guide to Systems Thinking for Organizations that's as short, clever, engaging, bright, and helpful as any business book you have ever picked up. This is a story with the potential to transform any organization and it is written for anyone interested in the workings and structures of human organizations: from Board Directors and Chief Executives, through Middle Managers to interested workers. (Subject: Systems Thinking, Organization Development, Sociology, Business]