Leading Systems: Lessons from the Power Lab
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Leading Systems: Lessons from the Power Lab

Barry Oshry
Berrett-Koehler, 1999
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Recommendation

Barry Oshry maintains that we all live in systems that inevitably shape our understanding of the world and our relationship to it. If you haven’t noticed a system encircling you, look again at your socioeconomic group, which governs you in far more ways than you suspect. To teach power, leadership, and systems, Oshry runs an experiential program in which participants totally immerse themselves in an "assigned" system, usually by living and working in a particular socioeconomic realm (as in "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" or a pauper). He has taught this "Power Lab" for thirty years. In this book, Oshry looks at human systems and at lessons from the Power Lab experiences. His insights are casually written, but well crafted. getAbstract recommends this fascinating, insightful book to anyone interested in power, leadership, human systems, and sociology.

Summary

Life: A Web of Systems

Ethnic wars, failed relationships, bloody coup d’etats and gang shootings. Such destructive events are replayed every night, over and over again on the nightly news. With each separate story is a unique set of circumstances built upon histories, personalities and twists of fate. It is within these details that we search for causes: some reason that the breakdown has occurred; some logical answer to the question, "Why?"

Often lost in our analysis is recognition that the same stories are played out in every culture and every society. In fact, these dramas are enacted on different scales throughout the complex web of systems in which people live: within families, organizations, nations, and groups.

But people often fail to see the common themes found throughout this matrix of systems. In fact, people usually don’t recognize the systems of which they are a part, even though every person serves many systems, some for the better and some for the worse.

When people are able to see the systems that interact to make up society, they can then spot the ripples within these systems that bring about familiar destructive results. But because people...

About the Author

Barry Oshry is the creator of Power Lab and The Organization Workshop on Creating Partnership. His programs have been conducted in hundreds of organizations in the U.S. and around the world. He is the co-founder of Power & Systems, Inc., an educational institute dedicated to deepening people’s understanding of social system phenomena. He is also the author of Seeing Systems.

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