Perspective

Our world is transforming. Now what? By any other names, peace and high performance (together) are the end goal and central challenge of every successful enterprise – corporate or community, startup or silo’d, from team rooms and committee meetings to executive leadership and governing boards.

The stakes seem higher than ever. But there is more in us – yourself, your team, your organization and community – than you think.  Look for what’s charged and challenging, but focus on what’s already working. Let’s make more of that!

  • Create more satisfied customers and engaged employees
  • Invite faster and smarter innovation and adaptation
  • Deliver more value for owners and stakeholders, and
  • Make bigger (positive!) social and environmental impact   

Together, we can jump start fully-engaged all hands initiatives, translate pain points into roadmaps that teams can rally around, and cultivate the collaborative relationships and practices that can drive results in turbulent times. Balance and momentum.

The future you want can happen faster and easier than you’d expect. That’s been my experience in corporate strategic planning, agile transformation, and in the middle of an armed civil war; in economic development and employee engagement; with start-ups, community groups and foundations; students from grade school to grad school, every level of government, and many religious organizations and denominations. I think we should try.

Practices

The organization of our world is dissolving – jobs into projects, communication into computers, corporate offices into homes and copy centers, and even national sovereignty into international markets and corporate strategy. The lifecycles of many jobs, products, strategies, and even some whole organizations have been crashed from decades to months. – Michael Herman, The Inviting Organization (1998)

Today, everything is urgent. We’re expected to respond quickly and effectively to all kinds of change or disruption. In spite of everything, we can cultivate resilience. Engage, learn, adapt, transform. Breathe. Invite new focus, catalyze action, sustain effort, scale and grow. These simple shifts can help us work in more powerful, humane and sustainable ways:

  • Invite Everyone to Focus and Engage (open more space)
  • Visualize Everything to Plan and Manage Effectively (create a canvas or marketplace)
  • Commit Incrementally to Deliver Dependably (synchronize efforts)
  • Learn Together to Improve, Replicate, Scale and Evolve (review, refine, repeat)
Cycle Practice: Invite Everyone Who Cares, Visualize Everything, Prioritize and Refine, Commit and Deliver, Review and Improve, Rinse and Repeat.

This approach is immediately practical, for any kind of business or community intiative, with the people and resources you already have. It works with all of the outcomes you need to achieve (your high performance) and everything that’s getting in the way (disturbing your peace).

Start with one or a few teams. Link product and marketing, sales and finance, or any other sorts of teams, in reinforcing, collaborative cycles. Connect supporting functions and allied groups. For best results, leaders go first. Start with the senior team, board and committee chairs, or any other core group – and work out from there.

Outcomes

What can we do together? Increase engagement and improve performance. Catalyze change and growth. Accelerate innovation and learning. Restore balance and vitality. Create something new and amazing. OR… anything else you really care about organizing and achieving.

Gain PerspectiveContact me to start a conversation about your work, goals and challenges. Let’s talk about people, priorities and possibilities. Engage key partners and stakeholders. Chart a direct route to the results you’re after.

Mobilize Teams and Networks – Invite and engage any size group (from 5-500+ people) in a wildly productive conference, summit, retreat or other strategic or tactical meeting. The more complexity, diversity and urgency, the better. We pioneered large online meetings in 2015, by the way!

Leverage Resources – Maximize the impact of the people, tools and resources you already have. Support champions, engage innovators, coordinate efforts, catalyze conversations and experiments. Make learning contagious.

Increase Agility – Accelerate innovation, adaptation and growth, from the C-suite to the team rooms, to improve customer experience, employee morale, business value and social impact.

Ride the Wave – Leverage the turbulence, lead the transformation, scale and grow, gain and regain balance and momentum, and keep your head above the water!

Experience

I’ve been inviting and supporting peace and high performance, with clients and colleagues on six continents, for more than 30 years.  The common threads are bringing people together and getting stuff done – getting the old work done easier and making new things possible.


In 1990, I was the rare Outward Bound wilderness instructor with an MBA in Finance from a top-ranked business school. Since then, I’ve been recognized for my teaching, writing and facilitation of self-organization, team learning, and enterprise agility.

A tenacious learner, I get pretty excited about discovering, sharing and co-developing better ways of working together on things that matter. The “Inviting Organization,” first described in this website in 1998, is still a useful roadmap for the biggest challenges facing organizations today.

My work with clients connects time-tested principles and leading edge practices — for transforming established organizations, engaging networks and communities, and guiding energetic startups.

I serve as a strategic partner to leaders and champions, innovators and learners, disrupters and transformers. Please have a look around – and contact me if I can help you cut a more direct path to the outcomes you really want.

More Bio | Case Stories | Writing

Resources

Here are my two most important and frequently shared resources: detailed practice guides for Open Space and Business Agility.

The Resources Library offers a small heap of other original material, including papers, checklists, practice tools, plus links to supporting materials written by others.

click to view/download – 60 pages
click to view/download – 31 pages

Let’s Talk

What are you working on? 

I serve as a strategic partner. Sometimes people call me a process designer, facilitator, teacher, consultant, project manager or coach.

My work brings people together, gets things done, and grows more of what works.

How can I be of service to you and your organization?

Email: michael@michaelherman.com

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