Working with Stories in Your Community Or Organization

Working with Stories in Your Community Or Organization
Author: Cynthia F Kurtz
Publisher: Kurtz-Fernhout Publishing
Total Pages: 684
Release: 2014-05-28
Genre:
ISBN: 9780991369409

"Working with Stories" is a textbook for people who want to use participatory narrative inquiry (PNI) in their communities and organizations. PNI methods help people discover insights, catch emerging trends, make decisions, generate ideas, resolve conflicts, and connect people. Participatory narrative inquiry draws on theory and practice in narrative inquiry, participatory action research, oral history, mixed-methods research, participatory theatre, narrative therapy, sensemaking, complexity theory, and decision support. Its focus is on the exploration of values, beliefs, feelings, and perspectives through collaborative sensemaking with stories of lived experience. Contents Introduction Fundamentals of Story Work What Is a Story? What Are Stories For? How Do Stories Work? Stories in Communities and Organizations A Guide to Participatory Narrative Inquiry Introducing Participatory Narrative Inquiry Project Planning Story Collection Group Exercises for Story Collection Narrative Catalysis Narrative Sensemaking Group Exercises for Narrative Sensemaking Narrative Intervention Narrative Return Appendices Example Models and Templates for Group Exercises Further Reading: Your PNI Bookshelf Bibliography Acknowledgements and Biography Glossary Index Reader praise "I wanted to say thanks for making Working with Stories available. It's an amazing piece of work, so simple (not the ideas, but the presentation) and unintimidating." "["Working With Stories"] is very thorough and helpful to me in exploring ways that I might capture the narrative of a project I am involved in." "Your detailed description of [the sensemaking] process is so useful and helpful. It makes seasoned facilitators like me yearn to try out the ideas." "Over the past few months I have been reading, reflecting, and feasting on your experiences working with stories. I am really excited to have found "Working With Stories" because it seems like a rich set of options for our needs." "Your terminology and explanation of participatory narrative inquiry have helped me greatly in understanding what I want from my practice and what I might be capable of achieving in social change." "I have been returning to Working With Stories time and again over the past six months to help support a community project, and my printed copy is underlined, noted and dog-eared."

Confluence: Tools for Thinking about How Organized Plans and Self-organized Patterns Flow Together

Confluence: Tools for Thinking about How Organized Plans and Self-organized Patterns Flow Together
Author: Cynthia F. Kurtz
Publisher: Kurtz-Fernhout Publishing
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2021-05-19
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780991369416

A path winds its way through a forest. Why does it go the way it goes? Did someone design it? Or was the path made smooth by feet that chose the smoothest path? Maybe some of both? Confluence examines the many ways in which organized, intentional plans (like paths we design) and self-organized, unintentional patterns (like paths that emerge where we walk) intermingle (happen at the same time and place) and interact (influence each other). The book lays out seven "thinking spaces" that explore various aspects of the structures and relationships that flow together in our lives. Confluence includes copy-ready materials for a group exercise you can use to think about how organization and self-organization flow together in situations that matter to your life, work, family, community, and organization. For printables, errata, and other information, visit cfkurtz.com/confluence.

Team Topologies

Team Topologies
Author: Matthew Skelton
Publisher: IT Revolution
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2019-09-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1942788827

Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity. In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams. Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

Large-Scale Scrum

Large-Scale Scrum
Author: Craig Larman
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2016-09-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0133813118

The Go-To Resource for Large-Scale Organizations to Be Agile Rather than asking, “How can we do agile at scale in our big complex organization?” a different and deeper question is, “How can we have the same simple structure that Scrum offers for the organization, and be agile at scale rather than do agile?” This profound insight is at the heart of LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum). In Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS, Craig Larman and Bas Vodde have distilled over a decade of experience in large-scale LeSS adoptions towards a simpler organization that delivers more flexibility with less complexity, more value with less waste, and more purpose with less prescription. Targeted to anyone involved in large-scale development, Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS, offers straight-to-the-point guides for how to be agile at scale, with LeSS. It will clearly guide you to Adopt LeSS Structure a large development organization for customer value Clarify the role of management and Scrum Master Define what your product is, and why Be a great Product Owner Work with multiple whole-product focused feature teams in one Sprint that produces a shippable product Coordinate and integrate between teams Work with multi-site teams

Organization Design

Organization Design
Author: Naomi Stanford
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2012-06-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1136436863

Organization Design looks at how you need to change the ways your organization does things in order to increase productivity, performance, and profit. Providing the knowledge and method to handle the kind of recurring organisational change that all businesses face, those which do not involve transforming the entire enterprise but which necessitate significant change at the business unit, divisional, functional, facility or local levels. The problem lies in knowing what needs to change and how to change it. Taking the organisation as a designed system, it describes four major elements of organizations: the work - the basic tasks to be done by the organisation and its parts, the people - characteristics of individuals in the organization, formal organization - structures eg the organisation hierarchy, processes, and methods that are formally created to get individuals to perform tasks, informal organization - emerging arrangements including variations to the norm, processes, and relationships, commonly described as the culture or 'the way we do things round here'. The way these four elements relate, combine and interact affects productivity, performance and profit. Most books on this subject target a wide management audience rather than HR, this is specifically written for HR practitioners and line managers working together to achieve the goal. It clarifies why and how organisations need to be in a state of readiness to design or redesign and emphasises that people as well as business processes must be part of design considerations.

Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8

Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 587
Release: 2015-07-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0309324882

Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and the education of young children bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Despite the fact that they share the same objective - to nurture young children and secure their future success - the various practitioners who contribute to the care and the education of children from birth through age 8 are not acknowledged as a workforce unified by the common knowledge and competencies needed to do their jobs well. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 explores the science of child development, particularly looking at implications for the professionals who work with children. This report examines the current capacities and practices of the workforce, the settings in which they work, the policies and infrastructure that set qualifications and provide professional learning, and the government agencies and other funders who support and oversee these systems. This book then makes recommendations to improve the quality of professional practice and the practice environment for care and education professionals. These detailed recommendations create a blueprint for action that builds on a unifying foundation of child development and early learning, shared knowledge and competencies for care and education professionals, and principles for effective professional learning. Young children thrive and learn best when they have secure, positive relationships with adults who are knowledgeable about how to support their development and learning and are responsive to their individual progress. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 offers guidance on system changes to improve the quality of professional practice, specific actions to improve professional learning systems and workforce development, and research to continue to build the knowledge base in ways that will directly advance and inform future actions. The recommendations of this book provide an opportunity to improve the quality of the care and the education that children receive, and ultimately improve outcomes for children.

Principles of Management

Principles of Management
Author: David S. Bright
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-05-16
Genre:
ISBN: 9781998109166

Black & white print. Principles of Management is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of the introductory course on management. This is a traditional approach to management using the leading, planning, organizing, and controlling approach. Management is a broad business discipline, and the Principles of Management course covers many management areas such as human resource management and strategic management, as well as behavioral areas such as motivation. No one individual can be an expert in all areas of management, so an additional benefit of this text is that specialists in a variety of areas have authored individual chapters.

Becoming a Knowledge-Sharing Organization

Becoming a Knowledge-Sharing Organization
Author: Steffen Soulejman Janus
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2016-10-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1464809445

This volume offers a simple, systematic guide to creating a knowledge sharing practice in your organization. It shows how to build the enabling environment and develop the skills needed to capture and share knowledge gained from operational experiences to improve performance and scale-up successes. Its recommendations are grounded on the insights gained from the past seven years of collaboration between the World Bank and its clients around the world—ministries and national agencies operating in various sectors—who are working to strengthen their operations through robust knowledge sharing. While informed by the academic literature on knowledge management and organizational learning, this handbook’s operational background and many real-world examples and tips provide a missing, practical foundation for public sector officials in developing countries and for development practitioners. However, though written with a public sector audience in mind, the overall concepts and approaches will also hold true for most organizations in the private sector and the developed world.

Creative Community Organizing

Creative Community Organizing
Author: Si Kahn
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2010-02-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1605094455

Privatization has been on the right-wing agenda for years. Health care, schools, Social Security, public lands, the military, prisons-all are considered fair game. Through stories, analysis, impassioned argument-even song lyrics-Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich show that corporations are, by their very nature, unable to fulfill effectively what have traditionally been the responsibilities of government. They make a powerful case that the market is not the measure of all things, and that a vital public sector is an indispensable component of a healthy democracy.

The Handbook of Organizational Economics

The Handbook of Organizational Economics
Author: Robert Gibbons
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 1248
Release: 2013
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0691132798

(E-book available via MyiLibrary) In even the most market-oriented economies, most economic transactions occur not in markets but inside managed organizations, particularly business firms. Organizational economics seeks to understand the nature and workings of such organizations and their impact on economic performance. The Handbook of Organizational Economics surveys the major theories, evidence, and methods used in the field. It displays the breadth of topics in organizational economics, including the roles of individuals and groups in organizations, organizational structures and processes, the boundaries of the firm, contracts between and within firms, and more.