Gift #4 Passion

 

Gift #4 – Passion

I was still new to DTA in 1995 when Kathie and Roland Loup went off to do work in India.  Of the many stories she told when she returned, I remember only one and, based on what I know now, I believe the story was about passion.  The DTA and Indian consulting teams were working together on the design for a large group meeting, and when discussing the three to five questions participants would use to connect with each other and the work they were about to engage in, Kathie was passionate about including this question “What do you yearn for in your work?” in the getting connected assignment.  She was particularly passionate about using the word “yearn.”   Although I knew what it meant to “yearn” for something, I didn’t quite get the depth of how the word tapes something in us that goes deep to our core until I heard Kathie’s story.   Kathie’s experience in India with this question was no different from the experience she’d had when using this question in hundreds of organizations around the world. 

Now fast forward five years and I’m in a very small village in Uganda with a friend/colleague and we are leading a session with about 100 women that do not speak English and we use, through a translator, the same question and as Kathie would say – “IT WORKED IT BLOODY WORKED!”  What I learned in all of this was how important the words we use are to the work we are trying to enable.  

Mary Eggers
Partner, Dannemiller Tyson Associates

Update on the program in India honoring Kathy Dannemiller

Last month I shared with you that The School of Inspired Leadership (SOIL) in India is sponsoring The Kathleen Dannemiller Memorial Train the Trainer Workshop the week of February 23rd in New Delhi.  Here is the web link that describes the program and how to register. 

http://www.soilindia.net/content/kathleen-dannemiller-memorial-train-trainer-workshop-lsip

Whole-Scale Workshop in New Delhi, India – February 2012

The Executive Education and Consulting – School of Inspired Leadership (SOIL) has just established a new program – The Kathleen Dannemiller Memorial, Train the Trainer Workshop to be held February 23-25, 2012 in New Delhi, India.

Kathleen Dannemiller was the inventor of the large scale interactive process now widely known as Whole-Scale® Change – a unique methodology which simultaneously involves hundreds to thousands of people in an organization or community.  The February workshop will be jointly facilitated by Anil Sandev the founder of Eicher Consultancy when he and Kathie did work in India, Anil is now founder and CEO of SOIL and Paul D. Tolchinsky a former partner in Dannemiller Tyson Associates and a co-author of the book Whole-Scale Change: Unleashing the Magic in Organizations.  Paul is now living and working in Vienna, Austria.

All proceeds of the workshop after expenses will be donated to Chinmaya Organization for Rural Development (CORD), which has been doing inspiring work in empowering women and the community in the villages of Himachal and are replicating the success of its work in Orissa, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.

Mary Eggers,
Senior Partner
Dannemiller Tyson Associates

Gift #3 – Trust the Process

 By now many of you know that the east coast of the US had a 5.8 earthquake on August 23^rd; it was centered 87 miles from my home where I was at the time, and it was my first and hopefully last earthquake!  Somehow that experience caused me to think about the phrase “trust the process.”  Although it is one of “Kathie’s gifts,” I came to know it 15 years before meeting Kathie when I went to my first of many retreats at what is now my spiritual community.  There’s a banner on the wall of the main room that reads “trust the process.”

Over the years I had learned to observe the process of my own life and to see its predictability.  It never occurred to me though to learn to observe the processes of my work until I met Kathie.  I got to know Kathie because I asked her to mentor me; it was a year into the mentoring that she asked me to join Dannemiller Tyson Associates.  When I first met her I knew nothing about Whole-Scale^®, which was at the time called Real Time Strategic Change.  In one of our early conversations she asked me “what models do you use to guide your work with clients?” I was an internal consultant at the time, and my response was “well there are lots of them, and I’m always experimenting with new ones also.”  Kathie replied “well if you keep experimenting, how do you know if they are predictable?”  I couldn’t answer that because I never stayed with one process long enough – I was fresh out of graduate school and experimenting was the name of my game.

Some years later Kathie was invited into an oil refinery in Texas because they had a rotten safety record.  Apparently everyone knew they were minutes away from death everyday when they came to work, and they were all blaming everyone else for the problem.  The meeting was with a microcosm of 30 people from across the organization.  Right after the leader kicked the meeting off, Kathie used our process for getting connected around the work to be done, which we call Telling Our Stories.  One of the questions that she used was: “What do you yearn to have happen as a result of this work?”  The process was done whole-room rather than small groups and Kathie said it took a lot of time, many were emotional about the situation and at the conclusion everyone was aligned around what need to happen next.  The rest of the day went smoothly with great results, and when everyone left the person that invited Kathie in said: “Yes, but you didn’t see how they really are with each other – always fighting.”  Kathie’s replied “Well you should have told me that you wanted them to fight – I could have gotten them to do that, and I thought you wanted to move them toward safety.”  Kathie knew, from using Telling Our Stories and specifically the question of yearning, that she could get a conflicted group to come together.  She’d used that question around the world from the US to Poland to India, in organizations of all sizes and shapes for ten years.

Back to the earthquake and how it relates to trusting the process.  My world was shaken that day.  The vast majority of us on the east cost of the US had never experience an earthquake and never expected to.  Of course I had no control over what the earth did and I could trust the processes that I’d learned in my life.  Processes like meditation that keep me center, in the present, and therefore away from things I have no control over.  It’s the same with my work, after 16 years of using Telling Our Stories I can trust it and predict the results.

What are the process of your life and work that you can trust?

Mary Eggers, Partner, Dannemiller Tyson Associates

Gift #2 – Disturbing the Universe

I still remember the first time I heard Kathie tell the “Ford Story,” the story of how she and five other senior consultants in the Ann Arbor area came together and inventing large group processes.  What stands out for me at this moment is how she got that call, and she taught us to do the same.                

In the early 80’s, there was no internet or e-mail, and the auto industry was dying – Kathie said the bumper stickers in Detroit read ‘the last person out of the city, turn out the lights.”  Her father was a union organizer, and she started her story with “I wanted to save my beloved auto industry, a little arrogant of me probably, and I felt passionate about it.”  She kept saying that until she got a call from a senior VP at Ford and the rest is history.  “Disturbing the Universe” was Kathie’s code term for her form of marketing.  I don’t believe she ever thought of marketing in the way we now think of it.  The main thing she taught us regarding disturbing the universe is that you put yourself out there, and your job is to say “Yes!” 

My choice of writing about this gift now is that it is what’s happening in my life, both my work life and my artistic life (I’m a fine arts artist when not consulting).  Like Kathie wanting to save the auto industry, all I’m doing right now is following my own passion and putting it out into the universe, watching it unfold, and saying a BIG Yes! to what comes back. My passion to undertake writing this series on Kathie’s gifts was the start of something that is unfolding in my work in ways I couldn’t have ever imagined. 

I know lots of folks, as I’m sure you do, that do the “same old, same old” in terms of marketing and don’t get the results they want.  Disturbing the universe is different than marketing.  Marketing is about making money; disturbing the universe is about following one’s passion – and no one did that better than Kathie Dannemiller! 

There are a handful of quotes that have stayed with me over the long haul; this one speaks, I believe, to passion, and it comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson – “What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.”

What are the passions within you, and how are you using them to disturb the universe?  I’d love to hear your thoughts or stories.

Mary Eggers
Partner, Dannemiller Tyson Associates

Whole-Scale Stories – Richmond Savings

If you have read our book, Whole-Scale Change: Unleashing the Magic in Organizations, you may recall the story of Richmond Savings.  Here is a great example of engaging the whole system to set organizational strategy.  This classic video was made by the client shortly after the large group meeting that culminated more than a year of work with this Canadian bank in Vancouver, B.C.  For those who want to experience how the Whole-Scale process works,  this video is still as inspiring as it was way back in 1994. – Al Blixt

DTA Workshop Coming to Washington, D.C. in October 2011

How to Plan and Implement a Successful Change Strategy:
Creating Change People will Believe In and Support
Dannemiller Tyson Associates and the Georgetown University Executive Certificate Programs in Organization Development and Organizational Consulting and Change Leadership invite you to three days of learning to improve your knowledge, skills and confidence as a facilitator of whole system change. The workshop will be held October 18-20, 2011 in Washington, D.C.  Whether you are new to the field or a seasoned practitioner, you will come away with new insights, tools and ideas for leading and managing change initiatives for your organization.  The early registration rate is just $995 until August 31st.  For more about the workshop read on.