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The impact of the coronavirus pandemic is bringing extensive economic disruption and transformation. In the social distancing environment, the meeting facilitator has to make extra effort to ensure inclusiveness, efficiency, and open decision making. This workshop will prepare businesses and organizations to adopt business practices that better leverage their employees and owners’ talents for more productive operations, more mindfully build in resilience, and increase relevance in a new environment.

Most of us spend half of our waking hours in authoritarian environments with a standard hierarchical structure. This is usually justified by a “need for efficiency”. What if there were a way to be radically inclusive and also efficient? For decades, there has been a method to accomplish just that, and it’s catching on!

This method has been called the “operating system for the new economy”, as one practitioner put it, and builds in the opportunity to participate, balance voices, increase impact, and provide an efficient way to make decisions quickly and safely for the organization.

After spending some time learning about non-hierarchical decision making, we’ll try it out on a real-world problem participants suggest, in break-out groups to make the exercise manageable. A second session is planned, and is designed to cover further methods, an opportunity for participants to share their experiences trying it out in their work environment, and get helpful feedback on their efforts.

Something to think about before the session: what do you bring to work in addition to your professional or technical skills?

Topics of Interest:

• Embracing adaptive communication styles
• Implementing inclusive processes to engage co-workers and collaborators
• Understanding organizational roles to better balance authority and responsibility
• Follow up on June 11th for participants to workshop what they have put into practice within their organizations

Workshop facilitator, Ron Gaydos, is a consultant in business development and special community projects. He has a masters degree in public policy and management from the Carnegie Mellon HJ Heinz III College, and has had professional development training by the Keystone Development Center, EF Schumacher Center for a New Economy, and Sociocracy for All, an international training and consulting organization for social change and transformative business.

With other members of the Pittsburgh Chamber of Cooperatives, Ron has led training in inclusive, non-hierarchical decision-making workshops since 2016. In 2019 he was a part of an international training cohort to impart non-hierarchical leadership in business work groups. Ron leads group meeting training for Work Hard Pittsburgh cooperative members. He also works with the Omicelo Cares/Neighborhood Allies Real Estate Co-powerment program to support their initiative to facilitate cooperative ownership of development projects in program participants’ neighborhoods by facilitating inclusive and efficient decision making training.