Philip J. Boxer
2-day Professional Development Workshop: PDW7
The way the economy works is changing radically. Organizations in every sector are being exposed to increasing pressures from ‘digital transformation’, ‘platform architectures’, the need for ‘horizontal transparency’ across boundary-crossing collaborations and ‘multi-sided’ demands. These pressures invert the organization, requiring it to shift its primary focus from internal activities to external relationships in order to be able to follow customers’ journeys. These pressures have been strengthened by the effects of the pandemic. They spring from customers’ resistance to having to follow suppliers instead of having suppliers follow them. The effect is to turn organizations inside-out.
This workshop will provide opportunities for participants to share their experiences of trying to meet these challenges within the context of their work. We will focus on two situations selected by participants from those they put forward as possibilities prior to the workshop. We will be assuming that what makes these situations challenging is symptomatic of how the larger organizational context ‘walls off’ support for new kinds of vested interest, placing them ‘beyond the pale’. We will be working with the relationship between the individual’s experience and what might be going on in the larger context that would sustain this counter-resistance.
The goal of the workshop will be to provide opportunities for experiential learning using a plus-one process to explore the situations brought by participants (Boxer 2019). We will use this process to uncover the gaps that underlie the dilemmas participants face and to understand how the ‘walling off’ of these gaps shows up in resistance/counter-resistance dynamics at different levels of the organisation. We will introduce Lacanian thinking to consider what unconscious dynamics these gaps might be symptomatic of, and to explore what forms of intervention are needed to change the dynamics within the larger ecosystem.
Given the online nature of this workshop, we will be meeting online prior to the workshop. We will also be creating follow-up opportunities to review workshop learning and outcomes.
See Full Overview (PDF) including PDW7 schedule and pre-meeting resources.
Philip Boxer BSc MBA PhD brings many years of strategy consulting experience to his work with clients in public, private and not-for-profit sectors, developing clients’ capabilities for leadership within highly networked environments; and using approaches that enable clients both to scale learning across networked organizations and to develop the agility of the supporting business platforms. Philip is a member of the (Lacanian) Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations. The focus of his research and writing is on ways of understanding and working through the maladaptive responses of organizations to turbulent business ecosystems in the pursuit of greater sustainability.