Dramatization. Reality. Experience. (Deng Queddeng)

“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.”
Alfred North Whitehead

You can never be prepared for what is real. So might as well act as if it’s real. Act as if you can never go back to what you think can still be fixed. Sometimes mistakes can be never revised. You have to constantly re-invent yourself and adapt to radical changes in your environment. One kind of large scale intervention was discussed in class. It’s called SimuReal which basically sums up what I’ve just said.

SimuReal, which was developed by Donald Klein and was continued by his son, is a large scale group method that provides a structure of participants to do real work, examine how they do it, and adapt it in real life in just one day. It is not role play; it’s the real thing. You adjust while the simulation is happening. You make decisions right there and then. You gain new insights and develop new ways of doing work.

SimuReal gives the members of the organization an avenue where they could work on real issues, learn from their interactions, and make decisions while being pressured by time, and gain skills and understandings. Through SimuReal, you learn about your organizational system and you have time to work on current issues and future designs. You gain insights while doing your usual work.

The workshop includes three stop-action periods. You do real work then step back and analyze what you’ve done (pros and cons). The debriefing is focused on what people are noticing about how they work and how they contribute to the task. The goal is to help the organization learn from its experience and determine what to improve for the next action period.

You leave the venue feeling that you’ve contributed to an increase in awareness of your organization and the feeling that you’ve helped in the improvement of your organization’s processes and how you work. SimuReal is also a wonderful tool to assist restructuring efforts. If used at the kickoff point, you can identify issues that need to be addressed. If used in a “test-drive,” you can see how the new organization might respond to its work challenges, and what gaps exist in the design.




SimuReal lecture and discussion

http://www.cmperme.com/pdf/cmp9706.pdf

http://www.change-management-toolbook.com/mod/book/view.php?id=74&chapterid=125