NEW DATE (Reschedule due to weather)

It is a proven fact that what we pay attention to will flourish. Organizations, like people, move in the direction of what they focus on. Too often the energy, attention, and creative resources of an organization are usurped by fixation on deficit thinking – trying to fix weaknesses. Reaching your full potential becomes impossible when this narrative becomes ingrained in the organization’s culture.  But what if we were to focus our attention on what works best in our organizations?  What if we prioritized the discovery and clarification of our strengths, the collaborative imaging of new ideas stemming from those strengths, and the design and delivery of progressive goals that manifest the best possible scenarios we can imagine for our companies?

The Performance Excellence Network is pleased to announce a special full-day workshop Friday, March 22 in Bloomington: “Appreciative Inquiry: Better Communication, Better Leadership, Better Teams through the Power of Improv and Leveraging Your Strengths.”  The workshop will be facilitated by Michael Gold, PhD and principal and founder of Jazz Impact (and keynote speaker at the PENworks 2018 conference).

Research has established that visionary organizations and their leadership have the capacity to learn and apply lessons from the best of the past (continuity), to surface and develop ideas for creative acts (innovation), and to enact actual changes in systems and behaviors to progress towards a desired state (transition).  And there are processes and tools to help organizations and teams do this successfully.

In his keynote for PENworks 2018, Michael, engaged people in the collaborative dynamics of jazz improvisation to provide insights into how the dynamics of jazz improvisation can enhance and sustain this type of workplace culture.  In this action learning workshop, Michael will take these ideas to the next level.  This session will use hands-on engagement with the jazz model as an introduction to the transformational methods of Appreciative Inquiry (AI), for which Michael is an accredited facilitator.

At the end of this session, you will have mastered the intuitive, highly accessible techniques of AI to enable you and the people you work with to:

• surface and identify your best achievements of the past, both as individuals and as an organization;
• understand the context and supporting factors that generated those strengths and collaborative achievements;
• collaboratively design strategies and organizational conditions that will foster and cultivate those strengths; and
• create action plans around procedures and behavior protocol that will foster organizational learning, innovation, and intelligent risk taking necessary to realize those envisioned outcomes.

Who should attend?

Any director, manager, department head, or change agent who feels that their organization could benefit from improved communication, innovation, and focusing on strengths to accomplish and sustain better outcomes.

The workshop will be hosted by Normandale Community College in Bloomington.  Investment is $325 for members ($650 for non-members).  Discounts available for teams of three or more from the same organization registering at the same time: $300/person for teams of 3-4; $275/person for teams of 5+.

Don’t miss this powerful, useful workshop!

Michael Gold Biography

As the Founder and Principal of Jazz Impact, Michael Gold, Ph.D., combines decades of jazz performance with interactive and experiential learning to create new ways of thinking about leadership, teamwork, social engagement, and collaboration in business. His extensive background in music, academia and business has been essential in developing Jazz Impact as an organizational development expert.

Michael has been a visiting lecturer at the Kellogg School of Management since 2007, helping to develop arts-based learning modules for their Executive MBA and Leadership Development Programs. He has also lectured at The University of Minnesota and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and as a former business executive has held numerous senior management positions in the real estate and financial services industries. In 2008, Gold was the recipient of The Fleck Fellowship Artist in Residence Program from The Banff Center for Creativity in the field of Arts Based Learning for Business.

Gold received a Bachelor of Arts from Bard College, a Master’s of Arts in African American Studies from The New England Conservatory of Music, and a Ph.D., in Performance from the School of Education at New York University. He has spent over two decades as a jazz bassist in New York and performed with such jazz legends as Lee Konitz, Al Cohn, Tal Farlow, Sheila Jordan, Jon Hendricks and Warne Marsh, to name a few.