It's hard to argue that the last few years haven't been tough on organisations and tough on Leaders trying to steer them through some very choppy waters - whichever sector you happen to be in. It's equally hard to see that, given the continued economic, environmental, social and political turmoil, the challenges are going to become any easier.  On the contrary issues of competition, diversity, sustainability and business ethics are here to stay.  During the two days of this event we will be working together to explore the nature of these challenges and their implications for future leadership and leadership development practice.

Interorganizational development requires to enrich classic OD-concepts in order to better meet the specifics of loosely coupled organizational systems, multi-stakeholder realities and cultural differences, collaborative management and work processes across organizations. In an OD-practice perspective this means to start a planned but open process and a solid multi-referenced process to ensure the right involvement and engagement of all stakeholders. In our theory-to-practice workshop we will provide concepts and cases and we invite participants to build on own experiences as (project) managers, co-ordinators or consultants of interorganizational networks or other collaborative ventures.

The "Organization Laboratory" is an application of the principles of experimental learning as performed in T-group settings to the wider system of an organization. It is offered since 1993 at the Uni Klagenfurt for students but also for attendees of postgraduate courses in organizational change, conflict management and mediation and consultants and managers from outside the university context. Current developments in the area of private as well as public organizations suggest that the knowledge of organizing is becoming even more important today as organizational change becomes permanent. Our paper outlines how the OLAB can contribute to individual learning about organizational behaviour, management and leadership in a way that helps organization to transform into better places.

The dynamic environments companies are facing today challenge organizational design processes and specifically human potential development. Companies with highly autonomous business units or in multinational settings need three crucial abilities: to translate strategy into processes, to translate processes into role profiles and to understand and develop human potentials to realize their strategy.
However within today´s companies there is little know-how in this third area and therefore a great number of such management activities are either delegated to external specialists or accomplished by the use of tests. These approaches lead to shortcomings. We argue that managers need to know more about human potential development – which competencies add value and how to develop them. Human potential development is a crucial instrument for strategy implementation. How this can be done as a learning process will be explored in the paper.

Papers presented:

Dagmar Untermarzoner: Acting as a long term consultant. Challenges for the professional practice: Received best practice paper award!

Lemon_DU_2011_Long-term_consultant.pdf

Hubert Lobnig: Focusing the business case and making use of teamwork - key issues in consulting networks and collaborations

Lemon_HL_2011_Networks.pdf

Hubert Lobnig: Strategy work in an international setting: Entangling top-down and bottom-up approaches via continuous conversations, learning cycles and semi finished instruments”

Lemon_HL_2011_Strategy.pdf