PACT is an organisational change and development approach informed by a complexity perspective. It sets to help you make sense of the experience of being in the midst of change. Unlike many change models that presume clarity of foresight or hindsight, PACT focuses on the essential uncertainty of participating in change events as they happen and enquires into the creative possibilities of such participation. PACT encourages participants to live with the immediate paradoxes and complexities of organisational life, where they must act with intention into the unknowable.
You will learn how to identify polarities also called paradox/wicked problems/dilemmas and how to use “both/and” Polarity Thinking™ to leverage complex and critical challenges that all leaders, teams, and organisational systems face. You will use Polarity Thinking™ concepts, practices and tools (including the Polarity Map® and the Polarity Assessment™) and gain experience leading change in your organisation.
Anchored in the paradoxical theory of change, polarity management and complexity theories, the PACT approach is applicable to any ‘problem’ /dilemma/polarity/ paradox/’wicked’ problem that is not solvable, including:
- Culture Change
- All strategic change initiatives –strategy and transformation implementation, IT transformation projects, goals and objectives implementation, balanced scorecards, performance measurement implementation, etc.
- Facilitated individual change -coaching, mentoring and counselling etc.
- Employee appraisals including 360 degrees
- Teambuilding
- Leadership
- Social change
PACT™ is a 5-step process –Seeing, Mapping, Assessing, Learning and Leveraging
Seeing-In this first step, we learn to suspend own biases, assumptions and expectations to give room to self and others to appreciate the immediate paradoxes and complexity of our situation. This helps open the doors to seeing that reality has multiple perspectives leading to multiple explanations leading to multiple solutions as well as seeing how the individual, group or organization creates own difficulties by blocking expression of parts of itself. It is also about seeing an individual, team or organization and their polarities more completely and exploring lost contact and resistances in the dilemmas.
Mapping is a values and language clarification process that helps you organise the wisdom generated in Step 1. Using a Polarity Map, You are able to capture the Upsides (values/beliefs/ Positive Results of focusing on poles) and the Downsides (Negative Results of focusing on the Upsides of both poles and to agree on the Greater Purpose that answers the question “Why it is important to leverage the poles of a paradox?”
The combination of the two realities contained in the poles supports the engagement of key stakeholders (those who are influenced by or could influence the process for which you are building the map) in each step of the process.
In Assessment, you involve different stakeholders representing the variety of perspectives in (and outside) the organisation to evaluate how well you are currently managing the change and the impact of your actions on your Greater Purpose.
You use Polarity Partnership’s online assessment tool to get real-time results. This reporting assures there is no lag time in your assessment process, and results are immediately available.
Learning involves giving meaning to the assessment results. What have you learned from this process so far? How do you understand and interpret the results? What contributed to the results, whether positive or negative? Key stakeholders” presence enhances the richness of this step. What you learn from this step supports the actions you take in the next one. In
Leveraging, you identify Actions you need to take to help people to safely interrupt patterns of behaviour that are not serving them and experiment with others more suitable to the change. Since both poles have their own particular values and strengths, reestablishing contact between them is the crucial first step in being able to use all their values and strengths in the best interest of the individual, group, or organisation. In this step, you also revalidate Warnings, measurable indicators that let you know you are getting into the downside of one pole or the other. Here again, having key stakeholders present will improve the quality and quantity of the Actions and Early Warnings.