About the Genuine Contact™ Program

The following is excerpted and edited from www.genuinecontact.net

In order for an organization to successfully navigate through change, health and balance in its ways of working, its relationships and its structure is required. Achieving this requires a healthy, balanced foundation for the organization to work from as an "operating system". It is an accurate metaphor to say that Genuine Contact provides an operating system for a living organization.

Genuine Contact provides patterns of simple, elegant processes that can handle all the complexity within and outside the organization including conflict. The Genuine Contact™ process doesn't dictate a particular organizational culture - each organization has its own unique culture, based on its purpose and its people. However, the patterns that Genuine Contact provides invite the gifts of all the people involved fully and effectively into engagement.

Through learning Genuine Contact, you become equipped with simple and practical "how to" methods, processes, and key ingredients for achieving organizational health and balance. These methods and processes are duplicable throughout the organization. The Genuine Contact Program achieves amazing results in working with what Stephen Covey calls the new “Whole Person Paradigm” which is required for organizations with knowledge and service workers to succeed.

The purpose of the Genuine Contact Program is to assist leaders and organizations to achieve successful healthy and balanced organizations creating what we refer to as the Conscious Open Space Organization. Consistent application of Genuine Contact processes, practices, philosophies and frameworks can support an organization in becoming a Conscious Open Space Organization.

What is achieved through Working with the Genuine Contact Program?

Through its holistic approach to business success, the Genuine Contact Program provides an effective and quick means to access the issues that need to be addressed in your organization and the solutions that need to be implemented. A participatory architecture is created to foster a solution-focused foundation for your organization, achieving results that surpass expectations. This foundation then provides a nourishing environment in which the human spirit can flourish creatively and fulfill its potential. Solutions come from the collective genius and passion of the organization's existing human resources, generating the energy to implement them in the process.

The Genuine Contact Program was designed with simplicity in mind, using meetings as a catalyst to develop healthy and balanced organizations for successful, sustainable optimum effectiveness. Genuine Contact includes meeting methodologies that tap into the intellectual and intuitive wisdom of the individuals involved and of the whole collective. The program identifies and incorporates key ingredients that need to be in place to support the new or enhanced way of getting work done. The resulting healthy and balanced organization is life nurturing, working as an interconnected learning organization. The process is organic, so every organization brings about its own unique change from within, simultaneously enhancing skills, capacity and competency for working with change in our rapidly changing times.

The Genuine Contact Program is also a program for building skill and capacity within the organization to address change. It is designed to keep external consultant involvement to a minimum. Consulting, training and mentoring are provided from the outside only enough to ensure that learning support is in place for the leaders that will lead change within the organization.

Tangible Results from using the Genuine Contact Program include:

Breakthrough learning resulting in solutions to complex challenges
Appropriate structure
Genuine community and effective communication
High morale and commitment
Spirited performance
Engaged involvement
High efficiency
High productivity
Shared leadership
Shared vision
Clear purpose
Growth from within
Elimination of barriers to doing a job quickly with excellence and pride
Increased creativity including creative problem solving
Sustainable and renewable organizational health and energy for further successes
An ability to navigate with change and take quick advantage of the opportunities it brings
An environment where the creative human spirit can flourish
Benefits from intuitive knowledge and rational knowledge working together in tandem

As an organization develops greater health and balance, change in actions, behaviors and patterns are required. More important are the changes in the way that purpose, values, assumptions, and structure are understood and worked with. For both individuals and organizations, growth-ful change comes from deep within. For both, change uncovers our fears of the new and unknown, yet we know that we must face the unknown if we are to grow and flourish. In the Genuine Contact Program, change is viewed as life nurturing rather than life depleting.

Leaders within an organization are taught to develop and use an operating system in which business is conducted with genuine contact at all levels on an on-going basis. These leaders are then empowered to teach others within the organization in an ongoing internal process until the new operating system is functioning fully in a growth-ful and effective way. This way of working is duplicable and self-replicating throughout the organization, and is customized to suit every specific situation.

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