Upcoming Events

Celebrate the holidays with your OD friends and colleagues. Bring your favorite ice-breaker exercise
(along with the context in which you used it) to share with the group. We’ll meet and greet each other from 6:15 till 7, then spend our remaining time together experiencing your favorite ice-breakers. Invite your colleagues and friends to join us! Light refreshments, beer and wine will be served to highlight the holiday mood! Because ODN-C encourages student attendance at meetings, please remember you must be 21 years of age to drink alcoholic beverages

Please join ODN-C speakers, Julie Benesh and James Sibley, as they facilitatean interactive session exploring Collaborative Resistance Resistance is anything but futile; it’s as necessary to constructive and harmonious living as… gravity.

Resistance is only destructive when it becomes an unconscious habit that polarizes parties and prevents collaboration and synthesis. The key to resisting well is surfacing, respecting, and continually integrating the lessons of resistance into intentional decisions and actions. Experience the positive value and power of resistance in this interactive program!
About our speakers:
Julie Benesh, SPHR, will have her PhD on January 15, 2011. She is a former ODN/C Co-Chair and an award-winning fiction writer. As Director of Organization Development at a large academic medical center, her current career interests include mentoring and peer learning in the context of diversity and inclusion. She has a certificate from the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland in organizational interventions.
Prior to joining Julie at Rush, James Sibley was AVP of Learning and Development with HSBC-North America. Prior to HSBC, during his twenty-nine years at Allstate Insurance Company he worked in multiple business disciplines – including Human Resource Development, Information Technology and Finance and Planning. James was the Executive Director of a local non – profit community-based organization that provided employment services for teens and young adults. James has a BS in Mathematics, an MBA in Finance and a Gestalt International Organization and Systems Development (IOSD) consultant certification.

Borrowing from the Fall, 2010 issue of OD Practitioner , we will start a conversation within our regional network about the best relationship between OD and HR. Join us on Tu esday, April 5 th for a n “experts” discussion. We ’ll watch as they engage each other around the questions of the OD/HR relationship. You, too, will get a chance to share your thinking with others and with our panel. P anelists include:  Philip Anderson, D irector of Executive Development, YMCA of the USA  Lisa Fitterer, Director of Talent Management, Navistar Corporation  Sandra Lamartine, Director of H uman Resources and Organization Development, James Hardie Building Products Inc.  Chris Pett, Christopher P ett Consulting  Christine Schoe, Vice President of Human Resources and Organization Development, Vibes M edia For more information, contact Maggie Shreve, Program Co-Chair 312/942-2989 or Maggie_Shreve@rush.edu.

Linkage Best of OD Summit

Join us to explore the relationship between mentoring and OD.
How can mentoring grow outstanding OD practitioners? How can OD practitioners use mentoring to develop compe-tencies and skills within client systems?
How can we experience real-time mentoring?

Share the Food, Share the Fun
Come to Elmhurst for the ODN/C Annual Meeting and Picnic on
Saturday, July 16th, from noon to 4:00 p.m. It’s a great way to have a
relaxing afternoon with friends old and new, who share your passion for
helping people through organization development. We’ll also introduce the
new ODN/C Board for 2011-2012 as the official business of our annual
meeting.
Share some food, share some ideas and share a good time. You’ll be glad
you did!
This is a pot-luck event, where the cost of admission is a dish of food that
will serve 4-6 people. We’ll provide drinks.
RSVP to get the address and
directions to the Sanders residence
where the fun will be happening.
See you there!
Register

What’s the latest research telling us?
How are key measurement tools working?
Join our panel to learn and discuss the importance of measuring the effectiveness of our organizational interventions:
• Maureen Talley, Senior Manager, Leadership & Organizational Development at US Cellular,
• Christie Brinker, Analyst, Organizational Learning Performance at US Cellular,
• Jonathan Konstan-Pines, Doctoral Candidate in Business Psychology at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, and
• Eric Sanders, President of OD Network of Chicago

• Can we create a renewed agenda for OD that places it at the center of corporate change?
• What would a renewed focus on our clients’ core business issues require of us as OD practitioners?
• How would it affect our identities, our relationships, our knowledge base?

For more than a decade until 2007, OD practitioners experienced a rapid expansion in the demand for our work in leadership development, large group facilitation, team effectiveness, and coaching. At the same time we were becoming increasingly marginal to the rapidly growing market for strategic business change, and we’ve seen our management consultancy competitors neglect or mishandle vital issues of culture, employee engagement, and organizational alignment. Since the financial crisis hit, we’ve done some of our best work ever with our client organizations as they have fought to survive and thrive – yet often we still struggle to show how OD impacts the core business and worse still, sometimes our practice seems quite marginal and rather stuck.
Re-positioning our role inside corporations requires grappling with some thorny issues and challenges including our identity (it can feel like moving away from our core value of human development), relationships (it entails difficult conversations with executives), knowledge (we don’t want to be like management consultants, do we?). Somehow we need to overcome our own resistance to change (as we so often advise our clients), so we can support the humanistic side of OD, and show clear business results at the same time. Join us to explore these key issues and together create a new agenda.

We live and work in a networked world with an ever-quickening clock-speed. Hierarchical organi-zations are feeling the heat and leaders seek change. OD has a rich tradition of designing and enabling change but does this hold it back for delivering change faster?

Join Merrill Anderson, author of Fast Cycle OD, to explore other ways to enable change, challenge assumptions about our profession, and support leaders making change. Merrill is a leadership coach, change consultant, author, educator and principal of Cylient, based in Des Moines.

Conflict in the workplace can range from mild differ-ences about how to get things done to us-versus-them blood feuds that can cripple an organization. Conflict emerges in modest, everyday work settings or it can writ large (as Doris Kearns Goodwin, presidential historian, related in her recent book, A Team of Rivals). Words that typically precede the “conflict” are telling — “managing,” “minimizing,” “avoiding,” “resolving” and even “surviving” conflict. And not every conflict can be con-verted into a productive conversation. But many can be re-directed.

How can we recognize them soon enough to use the energy of the conflict for a productive purpose? How can conflicting ideas, priorities and ideologies generate a crea-tive response?