Reinventing Organizations Experiential Workshop: A protected space that allows you to experience, remember and integrate other ways of being an organisation.
I thank The Kairos Project team for inviting me to write the following article about the experience of creating the “Reinventing organizations” workshop. It has allowed me to look into a process that has inspired me a lot to keep the hope that new ways of being organization and generating spaces for transformation are possible.
In April 2016 after Frederick Laloux’s visit to Chile, my great friend and Kairos Project Founder Diego Cuadra invited me to design a workshop he had offered to experience the book by Frederic Laloux called ‘Reinventing Organizations. I knew the book very well: for a year I had been studying it with a friend from Chile and it really called my attention to the interesting way of illustrating the evolution of organizations with the spiral dynamic model, as per the three pillars that he deduces from his study; self-management, evolutionary purpose and wholeness.
Like many, I was moved by the idea that organizations that were already functioning in a more comprehensive way already existed in the world and the realization that there were many of us who had the perception that a new way of organizing ourselves is already emerging more aligned to the needs of these times.
The challenge we came up with was interesting, experiencing through the body, the organizational evolutionary history in a few hours, understanding the “Teal” or integral model, and tapping into collective intuition for new ways of functioning in response to the new challenges of humanity. It had to be an experiential and innovative way to transcend the rational mind and include the whole being, body and emotions.
As an artist and coach, artistic disciplines, especially music and theater, have been very powerful tools when it comes to generating spaces of transformation and deep connection. At the same time, Diego was exploring storytelling and storytelling workshops, and felt very interested in including new methodologies. We both shared a holistic and integral vision of the human being and had been exploring different paths of personal and spiritual growth for several years.
We decided then to choose the tools we could use to generate a transformative experience that, together with coaching, allowed us to understand the book in an innovative, total and collective way.
We then began to design this experience by integrating different creative and artistic aspects such as live music, theatrical and rhythmic games, imagery, meditations and deep reflections, to take the participants beyond their mind, allow organismic wisdom and cellular memory to remember other ways of being both with yourself and with others. We invited other members of the Kairos Chile team to assist in designing our workshop. We collaborated to enrich this work with their energy, experience, wisdom and passion to open spaces of transformation.The result was wonderful, and was very well received by the participants, generating a context of humanity, discovery and the feeling of having lived more than 10,000 years of evolution in a few hours. We realized the importance of generating contexts that generate confidence to experience other ways of being, and that it is possible in a few hours to achieve a deep experience with others.
It inspired us and gave us evidence that cultural transformation is possible, that people and human groups have a deep desire and the potential to live together from totality, respect, love and enjoyment.
We perceive that community life is something that we have lost as a culture but is very rooted in our DNA as a species and an adequate context is enough to make us remember it and know that it is part of our nature.
The workshop’s methodology has matured together with the Kairos team, it has been refined based on our experience and complemented with new learning and tools. It is a protected space, elaborated with great care and affection. It is oriented so that people and organizations can open themselves to experience other forgotten dimensions of themselves and of living together with others, accompanied by live music, theater games, meditation, reflections and other focused dynamics to the real connection and depth. In addition, the workshop today allows a diagnosis, which raises information about different dimensions of the current organizational culture. This opens the possibility for future interventions and development of programs for organizational evolutionary development.
To date, we have done the workshop more than 50 times in several countries in South America and Europe, in different organizational and social contexts.
We also use it as a tool together with other social technologies, such as Sociocracy, Theory U or Agile methodologies. We are still surprised by the humanity, transformation and creativity that emerges in each group and individual that goes through it.
It gives us hope and deep gratitude to see what is so close and present, a new humanity which is only intentional and to provide a context for us to remember that we are also community, love, music, play, connection … In a world that is constantly changing, where the known way of relating and organizing no longer work, in a world where humanity is asking for more honesty, respect, depth and authenticity, new ways of relating and organizing are needed.
In the workshop, we invite you to a different experience of being, remembering other possibilities for interaction and experiencing the organisational dynamics from a context created to be with others, in confidence and enjoyment.
Our experience is that by experiencing these spaces that generate a new context, it registers in the body as a seed, which with a genuine and defined purpose, over time can make possible a real organisational transformation and a different workplace where individual and collective potentials thrive and blossom.
