Creating Futures that Matter Today

This book fundamentally reframes the possibilities for how visionary thinking and the creation of shared visions can positively impact an organization’s ability to facilitate change. 

Whatever kind of change facilitator you are, be it business or NGO leader, internal or external organizational development consultant, coach, or educator, you already know the importance of inspiring change around critical organizational challenges. But you may be tired of investing energy, time and money into change initiatives that are difficult, if not impossible to implement due to a lack of organizational focus and alignment.

This practical step-by-step guide will arm you with tools and strategies for facilitating change through engaging your teams and stakeholders in creating, communicating and implementing shared vision, whether the changes are large, medium or small. It enables you to access a team's innate creative capacity to envision meaningful solutions to critical challenges facing the organization – solutions clear and motivating enough to provide a framework for making decisions today.

There are many books that explain the "whys and how’s" of creating and formulating a vision statement. What's missing, however, is a deeper understanding of the real possibilities and broader impacts of visionary thinking as an approach to proactively addressing change. This book is about accessing the collective intelligence of a team to identify challenges and discover new opportunities critical to the future of your organization.

In this book, co-authors Marjorie Parker and Anna Pool share strategic insight on how to provide visionary leadership that is future-focused, innovative and inclusive.  Marjorie Parker is an organizational consultant who during her long career has focused on partnering with organizations searching for new ways to support creativity and innovation.

Anna Pool has dedicated over 20 years of her career to talent management consulting, executive coaching, and facilitation of leadership and organizational development. Helping leaders lead organizational change through shared vision is so important to the authors that they have provided exactly what you will need to start creating futures that matter.

 

Anna Pool is a business consultant and strategic thinker who has facilitated leadership and organizational development across a broad range of industries and clients, including Michelin, Shell, Verizon, Citi, Bayer, Nike, Raytheon and the Ford Motor Company, as well as numerous government agencies. A master-level certified executive coach with the Association of Corporate Executive Coaches, she is a trusted advisor to top leadership, providing insight, tough feedback and helping leaders build innovative and collaborative environments where the desired future state can be envisioned and systematically enabled. She is president of Executive Savvy, (www.executivesavvyinc.com), a boutique consulting firm headquartered in Durango, Colorado. Her business background includes experience at the Director and Board level of an alternative health care facility, benchmarked by the Harvard Medical School as one of the most innovative and effective of its kind. She is the former Director of Organizational Consulting for Lore International Institute (now a Korn Ferry company). She also served as the organizational learning consultant for Ford's New Business Leader program, an innovative action-learning program that was benchmarked by the International Consortium on Executive Development as among the best in the world. Anna is the author of the Bronze Telly Award-winning video series, Effective People Skills, and is the co-author of Lore's 360 Assessment of Collaborative Tendencies. She holds a Master's degree in Organizational Development from the Fielding Institute in Santa Barbara, CA, and has completed a two-year certification with The Gestalt Institute of the Berkshires. Website: www.futuresthatmatter.com

Marjorie Parker is an organizational consultant who has been recognized for over 30 years as a thought leader in the field of creativity. A native of Rochester, Minnesota, Marjorie resides in Oslo, Norway. She has consulted with senior management in Norway's leading corporations, health care institutions and government agencies and has been a frequent speaker at international conferences on creativity and innovation. Marjorie was awarded a national scholarship from the Norwegian Council for Leadership Development and a stipend from the Norwegian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research to document her work using a shared visioning approach to organizational development. She is the author of Creating Shared Vision - The Story of a Pioneering Approach to Organizational Revitalization, published in the US, Poland, Norway and Saudi Arabia. Peter Senge, author of the acclaimed book The Fifth Discipline, wrote the following in the foreword: "The story told in Creating Shared Vision is fascinating. It should be mandatory reading for those interested in revitalizing their organizations and in moving toward becoming learning organizations". The story of Creating Shared Vision has been a feature of a BBC/Open University production. Marjorie is also co-author of Dialogue - A Practical Guide (in Norwegian). She holds an M.Sc. from International Center for Studies in Creativity, Buffalo, NY. Today Marjorie focuses on mentoring organizational consultants who are searching for new ways to develop a more creative mind-set within their own client organizations.