Gift Work
Myanmar OD Network
We have been supporting our colleague Doug O’Loughlin with his research work on the Leadership Development Framework and his charitable work in Myanmar, Southeast Asia. Doug has been working closely with the ‘Myanmar OD Network’, an affiliation of passionate OD people from NGOs around the country. The Network have been studying the LDF and exploring what it means to their emerging leadership and have experienced some amazing shifts over the past year. They recently wrote to us to express their thanks:
Dear Harthill
On behalf of the Myanmar Organization Development Network (MODN) we would like to thank you for your major contribution to the development of our leadership, co-ordination group this past year. We have applied the Leadership Development Profile you gave us in our lives, our work, and our organization. It has really helped to shape our MODN leadership group culture by opening our eyes and helping us to be more choiceful with one another and as a group. It helps us a lot in our dream to move forward as a network as well as in our personal and professional lives.
In Myanmar we have a big leadership gap. As Myanmar citizens we are trying to build our country from different perspectives, expertise and roles in order to assist in our democratization process. Your assessment has made a significant contribution to our capacity-building process.
With heartfelt appreciation,
The coordination group of Myanmar Organization Development Network
Suas
We are working with the young leaders in Suas who support high quality English teaching in targeted under-resourced communities in India and Kenya. It has been a delight to be engaged with this charity, helping them to heighten the skills of their volunteer leaders.
Suzanne Flood, Volunteer Programme Manager, says of her experience with Harthill “It's difficult to describe the effect it's had on me; it's been like a fresh energy, renewed perspective, confidence both in myself, and in Suas as an organisation and what we are trying the achieve together, so all round legendary experience”.
At the heart of Harthill
At the heart of Harthill is a gradually expanding community of inquiry – a community seeking to support one another’s development and that of the wider group of peers touched by Harthill’s activities. We are also becoming increasingly committed to supporting others’ development, not only through coaching, organizational consulting, social science research, but also through creating website resources, artful books, and other activities that help a wider public create their own communities to experiment together, through first-, second-, and third-person inquiry, toward the exercise of mutually-transforming power and love.
In our evolving Harthill community of inquiry, our forms of first-person inquiry are very eclectic. The question we all share is: how to be present both to our own action and our own inquiry in ways that, over our lifetime, intensify our passion, our compassion, and our dispassion, as well as the justice of our effects on friends, peers, colleagues, neighbours and our natural environment?
In the realm of second-person research, we seek ever closer, more vulnerable, more transforming, more sustaining friendships in our stumbling search for a good life. In this realm of second-person research and practice, there are many ways to cultivate communities of inquiry:
- One way is to generate living inquiry through creating monthly, one-to-three-hour, phone or Skype live Trios or Quartets. Many members of our community are linked up in this way.
Our aspiration is that such transformational activities flourish globally during the next 20 years through this website and other media aimed at fostering the development of cross-cultural and cross-generational, de-centralised, inter-independent communities of inquirers worldwide.
If any of these possibilities appeal to you and you would like some support to create Action Inquiry experiments of your own please contact jackie@harthill.co.uk
