Facilitating 
Organisation Development

Building organisation, building the future

Facilitated by Rubert Van Blerk and Nomvula Dlamini

Offered as an in-house course

The space which organisations inhabited a few short years ago shifted dramatically. What seemed permanent turned out to be fleeting. The 2008 economic meltdown affected everyone and everything. It forced many in our sector to rethink the way we organise ourselves and go about our day to day business in the world. All kinds of organisations and institutions succumbed to the forces of change including the CDRA. We had no immunity to this change and nor did our clients. We served organisations that were turned upside down and faced our own internal turning, our own survival, turning on the edge and along with many others finding our way in a new landscape. Flexibility, creativity, mobility and a lighter framework now serve us.

Facilitating Organisation Development in this new landscape is exciting, risky, juicy and inviting. Organisations matter. They help us bring together our talents, skills, vision, will and resources to collectively face our human challenges with greater possibility of success and failure.

Come and join us on this 5 day course to explore, learn, converse and support each other to harness the power of organisations to achieve effective social change. We will unpack some of the new rhetoric and look at the principles and theories for hardier, more flexible organisations.

Who is this course for?
This course is for leaders, field workers and practitioners in civil society and government who want to deepen their knowledge and skill to harness the power of organisation to achieve effective social impact.

The Course Approach
The course examines the theory, principles and practices that underlie how we organise and the forms of organisation that we produce as living processes towards furthering our social aims. We follow a participative and experiential approach where participants are invited to bring and use their own experiences of organisation in communion with the content presented by the facilitators. Current trends in more associative forms of organisation, such as multi-stakeholder process, collaborations, networks and communities of practice will receive focus. The underlying principles and practices of relational and organic approaches to organisation is what we advocate.
Format and Curriculum Content
The course follows a five-day short course format where each day focuses on an aspect or theme in the book as follows:

Day One : Why Organisations Matter
  • Connecting to own experience of organisation
  • Key ideas and principles
  • Different ways of seeing and looking at organisations

Day Two: Understanding Organisations
  • Organisational elements and processes
  • Phases of organisation development
  • Power and relationships in organisations
  • Leadership as organisational function – roles/abilities

Day Three: Facilitating Change in Organisations
  • Common challenges organisations face in facilitating change in organisations
  • Different kinds of change – emergent, transformative and projectable
  • Core processes for facilitating change in organisations
  • Grounding and supporting change in organisations

Day Four: Learning in Organisations
  • Levels and types of learning
  • Learning rhythms, processes and activities  
  • Blocks and resistances to learning in organisations
  • Leadership and learning in organisations

Day Five: Applying Learnings to Practice
  • Consolidation and further development needs
  • A focus on grounding learning and change in own organisation