Society for Organisational Learning in the UK

Speakers:  Gerard Fairtlough and Andrew Carey

In his ground-breaking 1994 book Creative Compartments, Gerard Fairtlough presented a recipe for new ways of working together in organisations.  Among the ingredients that he listed were: 

Personal goals and group goals 

Dissent for the sake of task

Distribution of tasks

Communicating about facts, ethics and feelings

Unconstrained communication New mental models  

The Economist ran, from January to July 2007, a widely-discussed innovation project (called Project Red Stripe) – a six-person group that was given £100,000 and six months to create an innovative and web-based product, service or business model. Gerard Fairtlough was invited to act as a consultant to the project team and Andrew Carey was invited to write a book about Project Red Stripe (to be published late 2007 by Triarchy Press). In this workshop Gerard will expand on the above ingredients from his recipe for organizational creativity and he and Andrew will talk about their experience of The Economist project, using it as a case study framework to discuss the validity and usefulness of “creative compartments” thinking in the Internet-enabled, Web 2.0 world.

About Triarchy Press

Gerard Fairtlough is the founder of Triarchy Press, a publishing house established to provide a range of exciting new resources about organisations and how they work.  In particular, Triarchy Press bridges the gap between academic and research work and the daily practice of managing and running an organisation, and includes the father of the business systems thinking, Russell Ackoff, among its authors.  See more at www.triarchypress.com 

This was an extremely popular and successful event - a synopsis of the workshop is attached below.