Organizational Grief to Aid Emergent Practice in Times of Transition by Danica Meredith

"Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people, collectively, searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction" -- Mikhail Bakhtin
 
21st centure leadership is about sense-making, creativity and collective intelligence. Part of the change process involves an ending. Something (a project, team, department, company name) must end and yield to the new ways. Most organizations do not acknowledge this death and attendant grief. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud suggests that by doing the ‘work of mourning,’ one can grieve the loss and then move on from this loss. The Organizational Change model underpinning this talk is the Lifecycle of Emergence ("Two Loop Theory") by Meg Wheatley and Deborah Frieze.

This Dialogue invites participants to share from their experience, academic theory, and reading, some constructive methods for honouring grief, mourning, and organizational hospice work to ferry in new ways. With organizational mourning, the "Emergent System" can build on the past, as compost in the natural world yields nutrients from the old, to the new growth. 

Danica Meredith is an HR Consultant and Organizational Coach and the Founder of Constellations Consulting Co. She has experienced enterprise-wide transformation initiatives in 6 industries, in various roles. Danica's M.A. is in English Literature where her thesis centred on grief and mourning as a path to consolation. She will facilitate this EQ Lab drinking dialogue, and will share resources gathered by our collective wisdom for greater social impact.  

Missed a session? 

Catch up on over 100 different topics from complexity science to future leadership, organisational behaviour, narrative intelligence, climate crisis, culture, and much more.

As a member you not only get full access to an amazing depository of previous sessions, every week new ones are added as well.