OD Academy

We offer a full qualification in OD and Change and also a number of non-credit bearing Modules and Short Courses to develop core capabilities in Organisation Development and Change

At a Glance

From Live Facilitator Lead Courses to On Demand content, WorldsView Academy has an OD Solution for your organisation

Live Facilitator Lead Courses

Masterclasses

Short Courses

From Live Facilitator Lead Courses to On Demand content, WorldView Academy has an OD Solution for your organisation

Employee Engagement and Experience

This programme is designed for those with responsibility for creating a great work experience for existing and future employees to attract, engage, develop and retain your talent. Listening to your people, and harnessing their ideas to improve the culture of your organisation is now a mainstream tool for HR and Leaders. Working in a positive and energising environment delivers better results.

Effective Business Partnering

Effective Business Partnering is the process of contracting with internal stakeholders to effectively and constructively manage expectations and increase engagement, with the aim of interdependently achieving desired outcomes, in an effective and healthy way. This involves a process of building a community of internal consultants, who contribute to building a culture of Partnership of collaboration.

Introduction to Organisation Design

Organisation Design is the intentional patterning of behaviour to enable an organisation to survive over time in an effective and a healthy way. One needs to think of the patterning of human behaviour, to produce organisational outcomes in response to the liberating and constraining effects of structures to shape the way organisational results are produced.

Organisation Development Concepts

What is Organisation Development? Where are the boundaries of this profession and what are the basic ingredients of Organisation Development practice?

This introductory course is the foundation of the Certificate and introduces students to the profession of Organisation Development.

Organisation Development Practice

Building trust and obtaining commitment for Organisation Development interventions is a challenge many practitioners grapple with constantly. The task of balancing needs and demonstrating how Organisation Development will align efforts to the overall organisational goals is complex and requires a solid approach to work.

Completion of ODC110 is a prerequisite to this module.

Personal Development

In any Organisation Development role, your most powerful tool is yourself. It follows, then, that in order to become powerful practitioners, we need to understand and develop ourselves.

A career in Organisation Development is a life-long apprenticeship; so where do we begin, and what strengths should we build on?

Introduction to Change Management

Often we find that too much emphasis on change can lead to a loss of continuity within an organisation. When all change is treated in the same way, from a design perspective, we often confuse the desired outcome of change with the issue. This approach, compounded by the insufficient use of robust measurements to track readiness, progress and impact, can lead to change fatigue and the failure of change initiatives. So, how do we step into the change lead role with clarity, and confidently support sustainable implementation of change?

Process of Change Management

Linking strategy to organisational horizon and level of complexity is imperative if we are to implement effective change strategies for the given environment. Often we find that misalignment between change and reward structure is the result of one-dimensional thinking.

How do we break out of the cycle of using the same patterns, unimaginative engagement and communication strategies which produce the same, unwelcome results every time?

Fundamentals of Project Management

When we have multiple interventions running at the same time, it becomes more difficult to simultaneously manage all interventions effectively. Often Organisation Development takes a subservient role, becoming over-reliant on the project team because the Organisation Development practitioners do not fully understand the project language or approach. How do we gain a high level sight of the project management landscape in order to manage projects effectively, in the Organisation Development way?

Strategy and Action Planning

What is strategy anyway? Why do different organisations have different approaches to strategy development? The challenges to thinking strategically are compounded by the high operational demands of running a business. What does an Organisation Development practitioner need to know about strategy in order to let strategy guide Organisation Development? When and how does Organisation Development help to shape strategy?

Organisational Communication

As organisations and change interventions become larger and more complex, communication becomes more challenging. We often find that the established communication channels in our organisation are not wholly effective for supporting change and Organisation Development efforts. So how do we communicate effectively to support increasingly complex Organisation Development needs?

Business Acumen

Business Acumen is the ability to make wise business decisions. Organisation Development practitioners need this competence themselves and need to be able to enhance the business acumen of the entire organisation.

How do we, as Organisation Development practitioners, act with impact and encourage investment in Organisation Development activities?

Team Development

Teams are the key unit of transformation and execution within many organisations. However, team development is complex and risky and practitioners often find themselves grappling with content, process and design all at once. With many products on the market and complex team challenges, which team development product should you choose?

Facilitation Skills

Practitioners often find themselves designing and running meetings using techniques which are unable to respond appropriately to the context or address organisational issues.

This 2-day skills programme will provides the necessary skills and techniques for successfully planning, preparing for and facilitating a variety of organisational and group processes.

Masterclasses

We have recently launched our Masterclass series. There are a number of topics that we have been speaking on at café’s and other events which we found to be very popular and valuable to our clients, these are suggested here. We can also customise these to suit your organisational context and goals and they vary from 2-hour sessions to full-day sessions. Speak to us about conducting an in-house Masterclass at your organisation

How to manage Innovation

As leaders and managers in businesses we know Innovation has become imperative, not a choice – but how do we manage innovation? Is there a difference between being a great manager and being a great manager of innovation? How do we take innovation from the presentation screen into everyday working life, and make it stick?

Telling people in your teams or organisations that innovation is important is not that difficult, but showing, walking the talk, and acting in a way that takes people along is a huge challenge. For instance (and this is a difficult one): in order to innovate we must experiment, which requires failure – but how often do managers openly talk about their failures? If we are successful in making innovation work, how do we keep that machine well-oiled? How do we constantly celebrate victories of innovation and the innovator to motivate, without it becoming a box we tick?

Teams for Innovation

The competitive advantage for most organisations is the ability to be innovative – we believe one of the vital ingredients to innovation is building and enabling high performance teams.

Together we will explore the link between innovation and teams. We will look at what this ‘buzzword’ innovation means and how we can accelerate innovation through creating the correct teams and enabling them to be successful.

Do you have the correct potential and talent in your teams, but something is stifling the innovative work? How do you mandate a team to find solutions in a space where we don’t have the answers yet? What are the tools your teams need to be innovative? How do we create co-creative spaces for teams?

The link between Culture and Leadership

There are hundreds (if not thousands) of definitions of both Leadership and Culture but let’s use these for now: Leadership is a set of behaviours which influences people in an organisation to align to a purpose, execute on a strategy and renew/adapt as needed, whereas Culture is the way we do things around here. The link is obvious, isn’t it!

Let’s explore this link in more detail and answer the question: how do we leverage this link and enable leaders to influence culture in a positive way?

Talent and Innovation

We all know that managing talent well creates business value – right? If you google ‘what keeps the CEO up at night’ Talent comes up in the top 10 (if not top 3) of almost all the studies conducted in the past few years. We must find the right people and keep them – and to make this more complex, these people needs to innovate to help us succeed in this rapidly changing world.

Future Fit Leadership

We live in a VUCA world with ever-increasing Volatility, Uncertainty (or Unpredictability), Complexity and Ambiguity. This leads to numerous (often unplanned and unexpected) leadership challenges:

• A breakdown in shared understanding of what leadership is;
• Greater, unrealistic expectations of leadership: ‘leadership on steroids’;
• Accelerating mistrust, anger with, suspicion of, and disillusionment ininstitutional leadership experienced as a sense of alienation from leaders; and
• Leadership no longer have any place to hide: in public, investor and regulatory eyes anytime, anywhere, anyhow.

How do we respond as leaders of our organisations to the challenge of building the leadership capability required to succeed in this environment?

Building Adaptive Capability

We have noticed that quite a few our clients are facing increasing complexity and a need for becoming much more agile or adaptive in how they organise and operate to remain competitive. We are interested in three major areas as they relate to organisations’ adaptive capability:

• How organisations are designed to set up to respond to complexity
• The shifts in leadership and culture required to become more agile and adaptive
• The shift from individual performance to team performance, and building “team capability” as a performance differentiator in complex conditions

Navigating Traumatic Organisational Change

Tough economic conditions, combined with phenomenal shifts in the nature of organisational work itself (for instance the emergence of the 4th Industrial Revolution), strain the organisational world in various ways, the worst of which are company failures (such as bankruptcies and closures), restructurings (read redundancies, retrenchments, and so on), and of course, the spectre of unemployment. We do not exaggerate when we call these kinds of organisational change traumatic. We accept that organisations need to do what they must to survive, where they can, and in the current economic climate traumatic change is to a large extent unavoidable. The impact of this kind of change is multidimensional, complex and long-lasting.

How do we, as organisational leaders, members and practitioners, navigate traumatic organisational change? How do we respond to this kind of change in ways that are ethical and responsible, effective and healing? How do we support organisational communities while they are breaking up (because this is what happens during retrenchments), those who are no longer part of the organisational community, and the re-making of organisational community with those that remain?

What are the individual and organisational risks and challenges that we need to face?

What do leaders, HR, change managers need to navigate change and sustain performance in their organisations in times like these, in such ways that pain is transformed into healing, and challenge is transformed into growth, for all involved?

Servant Leadership

Is all about putting the wants and needs of followers first and those of leaders second, which is in stark contrast with the leader-first perspective where gaining control is a priority. Most of us have experienced (and sometimes practiced) the leader-first way in our organisations and society, and for centuries it has either made sense or was just the way things were done.

In today’s fast-changing world we have to be customer-centric, adaptable and flexible, make fast decisions, and innovate – all of this necessitates a different type of leadership, and this is what servant leadership offers us. But to become servant leaders, and to establish servant leadership as the way we lead in our organisations, require a major shift in how we think and feel about leadership, and how we show up as leaders – in others words, in our leadership culture.

Where leaders were previously expected (and allowed) to make things happen through command and control, the servant leader is expected to ask ‘how can I help’ – and mean it! Servant leaders replace power and control with authority and influence. Servant leaders lead from the back rather than from the front. And so on. What are the implications of this? How can the impact of servant leadership be sustained? Will it work in all organisations?

Organisation Identity and Reputation

Let’s explore the relationship between the experienced internal brand of an enterprise (sometimes also called culture) and the external brand (customer or stakeholder delight) as drivers of brand reputation. Recent events in companies such as Bell Pottinger, KPMG and McKinsey has brought into sharp relief the dramatic impact the perceptions of organisation identity and reputation can have on business sustainability.

Building resilience in a complex world

How can we and our organisations build resilience in this complex time?

We will explore the concept of resilience and how much this has changed recently, the sources of our resilience, such as purpose, relationships, community, meaningful work, service, empowerment, etc., and what can we do immediately to make our organisations and our people more resilient

Change Resilience

Pre-2020 we used to think we live and operate in a VUCA world, it then turned out that what we thought was volatile (etc.) was not as rough as we imagined. With accelerated change coming at us daily the responsibility of making change successful cannot rest only on people with “change manager” in their title anymore, they need help, and one way to give them that support is by empowering a larger part of the organisation to understand the basics of change and how to navigate that. We call these people change champions (for now), a selection of the early adopters, empowered with an understanding of change and how to navigate the process.

Practically organisations cannot afford the time and investment to train lots of people in change, this is our solution to quickly and affordably empower a large number of people to show up with resilience, courage and skills to support change.

This is a 4-hour workshop facilitated online or face to face. In-house workshops are available at R18 000 for groups up to 20 where customisation is possible. Public workshops are available at R1890 per delegate.