Complexity Science, People, and Organizations
Roger Lewin (USA) - View bio
Birute Regine (USA) - View bio
Friday, October 29:  10:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. / 1000-1230
CCEU: 2.50 PD
Intel's former chief, Andy Grove, once said, "With all the rhetoric about change, the fact is that we managers hate change, especially when it involves us." But as we well know, in our fast-moving, interconnected, global economy, change is inevitable, and with it comes uncertainty. The challenge for managers is to guide change in positive directions, so that their organizations can adapt and transform uncertainties into new strengths. The challenge for coaches is to work with their clients create conditions that nurture such change in positive ways, at the individual and corporate level.

The new science of complexity offers a novel perspective of business organizations as complex adaptive systems, rather than the traditional machine model. In such systems, the interactions within them are the source of novelties that emerge from them. What develops from human interactions in organizations is the culture, innovation, and creativity. Complexity science provides insights as to how to enhance those interactions so that desired outcomes grow from the seeming chaos of an environment of creativity and rapid adaptation.

Participants will learn practical steps coaches can use to assist their clients with issues around uncertainty and change, in the realms of organizational structure and culture.

Questions:

1. What are the greatest obstacles you encounter for engendering change, in individuals and in organizations?
2. What are some strategies your clients can use to tolerate uncertainty?
3. What is your response to this statement: How leaders deal with vulnerabilities in themselves and with others characterizes their leadership style.
4. Feminine characteristics such as inclusion, relational and emotional intelligence, collaboration, and empathy, are powerful skills to have in interconnected, interdependent realities like complex systems, but they have been marginalized as soft. How is "soft" the new hard?

Internationalism Becomes the Norm
Peter Kerr (USA) - View bio
Friday, October 29:  10:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. / 1000-1230
CCEU: 2.50 PD
The future belongs to people who can adeptly navigate the multicultural landscapes of tomorrow without getting lost in the challenges posed by diversity and globalism.  It's not uncommon for coaches to encounter a dozen different cultural contexts in a single day, and often they are all inside the same organization!  People from widely divergent ethnic and business cultures are no longer separated by national borders, but are more often only separated by cubical half-walls.  As globalism increasingly breaks down barriers between people, coaches must recognize cultural differences, reach out to increasingly diversified customer bases, and be prepared to adapt leadership and management styles to fit any occasion.  Coaches furthermore must learn how to demonstrate genuine respect for all kinds of people and encourage businesses to recruit and train cross-culturally savvy talent. 

This Global Conversation will introduce you to the major factors separating cultures, familiarize you with behaviors that increase your cultural intelligence, and allow you to discuss and learn in small groups about the cultural challenges facing coaches today and tomorrow. 

Participants will break into small groups and will discuss at least three of the questions below.  Group leaders will report out at the end of the session to share their group's unique insights.

Questions:
1.     Have you ever been frustrated by an intercultural difference? What did you do to overcome it?
2.     The ICF is committed to being international; how do we embrace and become the international organization we aspire to be?
3.     What point on intercultural behavior did the speaker make that most resonated with you?
4.     What single tidbit of advice do you have to help people be more culturally intelligent?
5.     What's the difference between personality and cultural differences?  How does our response differ between handling interpersonal conflict   and intercultural clashes?
6.     What skills do ICF coaches need to develop to help others with intercultural issues?
7.     How are ICF coaching practices being held accountable for this increasing need in our world?
8.     How do we stay respectful to other cultures without giving up our own distinctives?

Transforming the Fragmented Community Through Deep Dialogue
Ashok Gangadean (USA) - View bio
Friday, October 29:  10:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. / 1000-1230
CCEU:  2.50 PD
The absence of belonging is so widespread that we might say we are living in an age of isolation, imitating the lament from early in the last century, when life was referred to as "the age of anxiety." We talk today of instant sharing of information, but it doesn't create a sense of belonging. It doesn't create the connection from which we can become grounded and experience the sense of safety that arises from a place where we are emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically a member. The cost of our detachment and disconnection is not only our isolation, our loneliness, but also the fact that there are too many people in our communities whose gifts remain on the margin.

If we care about transformation, then we will focus on bringing the gifts of those on the margin into the center. If we have any desire to create an alternative future, it is only going to happen through a shift in our language by posing, reframing, and inverting questions that create depth and opening for authentic change. This is a call for the collective intelligence of ICF members, who will be accountable and committed to what we create as a result of this Global Conversation (Peter Block, Community, 2009).  

The questions for the coach are: