NTL Member Book Publications
Journeys of Race, Color & Culture
Rick Huntley, Rianna Moore, Carol Pierce
About Journeys of Race Color & Culture
The concept of “Journeys of Race, Color, and Culture” explores the complex and multifaceted experiences of individuals and groups as they navigate the intersections of race, color, and culture. This journey is often marked by struggles for recognition, acceptance, and respect, as individuals and communities seek to overcome historical and systemic barriers to equity and inclusion.
The book “Journeys of Race, Color, and Culture: From Racial Inequality to Equity and Inclusion” offers a path to effectively dialogue between racial and cultural identity groups, deconstructing whiteness and reconstructing power dynamics. The authors, Rick Huntley, Rianna Moore, and Carol Pierce, provide a framework for understanding the parallel journeys of people of color and white people moving away from dominance and subordination, towards a transition to equity and inclusion.
The book is highly readable and graphically documented, making it accessible to a wide range of audiences. The Tri-Color Fold-out Graphic, which is included in the book, visually represents the journeys of race, color, and culture, providing a powerful tool for understanding and dialogue.
The concept of journeys of race, color, and culture is not limited to the book, but is a broader framework for understanding and addressing the complex issues of social relationships and power dynamics. It encourages dialogue and understanding across racial barriers, and provides a way to explore the deep yearnings for inclusion and recognition.
In practice, the concept of journeys of race, color, and culture has been applied in various settings, such as education, coaching, and organization development. For example, the Mount Vernon Unitarian Church hosted a series of dialogue sessions based on the book, led by Rev. Kate and Sue Ries Lamb, which aimed to facilitate understanding and connection among individuals from diverse backgrounds.
Overall, the concept of journeys of race, color, and culture offers a powerful framework for understanding and addressing the complex issues of social relationships and power dynamics, and provides a path towards equity and inclusion for all individuals and communities.
Change Champions
Fred Miller, Judith Katz and Monica Biggs
About Change Champions
For four decades, the authors of this powerful new book have helped organizations, large and small, transform their cultures to be more inclusive and made diversity a strength. In this book, Fred Miller, Monica Biggs, and Judith Katz share their experience using “change champions” for cultural transformation, rapidly changing the core narratives in an organization that shifts day-to-day conversations, actions, and decisions in positive directions.
Change champions are people from all parts of an organization who volunteer to be advocates for a new way of thinking, talking, and acting. This short book shows you how to prepare leaders for a change champion intervention, how to select change champions, and the critical process of building this group into a connected, caring community by ensuring each of the champions goes through a transformational journey personally and collectively. You learn how to support the initial activities of change champions as they advocate for change in their day-to-day work, how to help their supervisors support their change champion, and how the change champion’s role evolves as the culture shifts in the direction you are trying to go and becomes ready for bigger shifts.
Numerous examples and cases will demonstrate the different steps in the unfolding change champion journey to produce a more inclusive organization. This book is a key resource for those wanting to improve inclusion, leverage diversity, equity, and access to achieve higher organizational performance.
But this book is more than that, as the change champion method can be adapted for any change requiring an organization-wide shift in thinking and acting. Leaders and professionals who have struggled to increase, for example, safety, sustainability, psychological safety, customer focus, and even cost consciousness may find the change champion approach just what they need to break through the resistance of a strong culture.
The change champion method is a different kind of Dialogic OD intervention from the others in our series, but it meets all the criteria for Dialogic OD, fits well with a Dialogic Mindset, and is a proven method for fundamentally transforming organizational culture.
The Authors
Fred Miller
Fred is the CEO of The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, Inc. He is an OD Network’s Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, named a Pioneer of Diversity by Profiles in Diversity Journal, and received the Forum on Workplace Inclusion's Winds of Change award. In 2018, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from The Sage Colleges. Co-author of four books and numerous articles, he is a past member of the Board of Directors of ATD, OD Network, NTL Institute, and Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc.; he currently serves on the board of Day & Zimmermann.
Monica Biggs
Monica is an OD consultant with over 30 years of experience assisting organizations in creating and sustaining high performing, inclusive work groups; coaching executives; and developing leaders. Associated with The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, Inc. since 1997, she now serves as a Senior Consultant Emerita. She holds a doctorate in human resource development from The George Washington University, has taught organizational studies at Russell Sage College, and has co-authored several articles on inclusive leadership.
Judith Katz
Judith has distinguished herself as a thought leader, practitioner, and strategist. She is the recipient of the Organization Development Network Lifetime Achievement Award and as one of 40 Pioneers of Diversity. Judith holds a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts. With Frederick A. Miller, she has co-created many key concepts in OD to create inclusive collaborative workplaces and achieve higher organizational performance, such as Interaction Safety and Conscious Actions for Inclusion. Her ground-breaking book, White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training (1978), was the first systematic training program to address racism from a white perspective. Judith is a past member of the Board of NTL institute and currently serves on the Fielding Graduate University Board of Trustees.
To contact the authors, email kjcg411@kjcg.com.
Opening Doors
Judith H. Katz and Frederick A. Miller
About Opening Doors
Organizations are only as productive as the interactions that take place within them. How can we enhance these interactions - and so achieve higher performance? Through 4 Keys that change the nature and quality of every interaction. In Opening Doors, authors Katz and Miller describe how leaning into discomfort, listening as an ally, sharing intent and intensity, and sharing “street corners” can open doors to greater success for every individual, every group, every team, every initiative, every strategy, and the entire organization. The book also explores the one critical decision behind every interaction-Judging or Joining the other person-and how it can transform our ability to partner with others and do our best work together.
Excerpt
Higher performance? Quicker problem solving Faster and better decision making? Higher productivity? Transformative breakthroughs?
How often do the doors to collaboration and teamwork remain closed because people:
● don't feel safe to speak up?
● misunderstand each other's intent?
● don't want to hear different points of view?
● don't trust each other?
How can people open these doors to unleash the full potential of themselves, their teams, and their organizations?
4 Keys That Change Everything
We know this is a BIG statement. These 4 Keys do change every interaction. We have seen it. We have lived it. And yes, we understand why you might be skeptical.
We would doubt such a BIG claim, and we won't blame you if you doubt it too. But we have observed these keys at work in organizations all over the world. The Keys provide a common language that everyone can use. They are simple and powerful.
Key #1 Lean into Discomfort
Opens the Door to Trust
Opening this door feels like I am taking a risk, but if I want greater teamwork and collaboration, I need to Lean into the Discomfort I feel in order to get to know you better. How else can we work together? How else can we solve problems and eliminate confusion and wasted effort?
When I Lean into Discomfort I help make it safer to be honest and open with you. As I feel safer, and you feel safer, we can open the door to trust. Unless I am willing to Lean into Discomfort, the door to those possibilities and potential will remain closed.
Key #2 Listen as an Ally
Opens the Door to Collaboration
When I Listen as an Ally, it enables me to hear what you, my team members and colleagues, are saying, and for all of us to build on each other's ideas.
Slowing down to really hear you is the key that unlocks the door to collaboration, which results in the faster achievement of our goals.
Key #3 State your Intent and Intensity
Opens the Door to Understanding
When you State Your Intent and Intensity, it helps me, my team members, and my colleagues take the guesswork out of suggestions or directions and opens the door to greater understanding of each other. Stating my Intent and Intensity does the same for you.
As the door to understanding is opened, I see how to contribute more quickly, confidently, and decisively. When I know how best to contribute, I know how to add value; and if you do the same, we can each add greater value. And this combined greater value results in our saving time as we achieve Right First Time interactions.
Key #4 Share Street Corner
Opens the Door to Breakthroughs
When you Share Your Street Corner and I share mine, we learn to hear differences as contributions, rather than as sources of conflict. As we share our different perspectives, we can see the fuller 360-degree view, use our combined resources, and achieve breakthroughs none of us could have envisioned or accomplished alone.
The Authors
Effective Multicultural Teams: Theory and Practice
Claire B. Halverson, Ph.D. and A. Tirmizi
About Effective Multicultural Teams
The co-authors created this book when they found no relevant texts for a course in which they taught at a graduate program at the School for International Training (SIT) in Brattleboro, Vermont. They learned from the rich experiences of students from six continents who were or planned to be working in the public, educational, not-for-profit, and profit sectors and from their own consulting. They were enthusiastic about the potential of multicultural teams with their diversity to be more effective than those that are not diverse.
Relevant chapters explore the numerous factors impacting team effectiveness and the variety of forms of teams, cultural frameworks, the foundations of individual and social group behavior, stages of group development, team processes, roles of members and successful meetings, leadership, conflict, communication, and problem-solving/decision making.
Author Biography
BE BIG: Step Up, Step Out, Be Bold
Judith H. Katz and Frederick A. Miller
About Be BIG
Be BIG challenges each of us to show up more fully as individuals in the work place and dares us to do our best work together. Too many people have decided that the safest way to get through life is to be small. They try not to attract attention to themselves, just tending their own safe little garden. They've decided it's too dangerous to think big, to speak out, to take risks. They might get shot down. Or look foolish. People will think they're just not good enough.
But, particularly today, organizations need people to step up and be BIG. We need new ideas, new products, new processes. People have to bring more of themselves to the workplace, to contribute more, and to have a bigger impact on the success of the organization..
This inspiring illustrated book challenges all of us to show up more fully as individuals and in our interactions with others and to find ways to be BIG together. In straightforward, incisive language, Judith H. Katz and Frederick A. Miller help us understand all of the many, sometimes subtle ways we make ourselves small. They show how we make others small as well and how these same attitudes can keep us from working together effectively. And they encourage us to nourish new attitudes that will make us, our coworkers, and our organizations bigger.
Be BIG invites us to bring more of ourselves to each situation—whether working independently, with another individual, or with a group—so that we can do our best work together.
Daring to Do Our Best Work Together.
Too many people have decided that the safest way to get through life is to be small. But organizations need people to step up and Be BIG. People have to bring more of themselves to the workplace, to contribute more and have a bigger impact. Be BIG challenges each of us to show up more fully as individuals and in our interactions with others and to find ways to Be BIG together.
The Authors
Inclusion Breakthrough
Judith H. Katz and Frederick A. Miller
About Inclusion Breakthrough
The Need for an Inclusion Breakthrough
Organizations today are being forces to live by their wits. Their survival depends on their ability to out-think their competition, which can only be accomplished by catalyzing the intellectual resources of their people into creative new solutions. A single person's brilliance or a single group's point of view is no longer enough to sustain an organization's growth in the face of global competition. Tomorrow's successful organizations will be those that harness the collective and synergetic brilliance of all their people, not just an elite few. The stock-market stars will be the organizations that capitalize on the diversity of their workforce.
But capitalizing on diversity requires more than simply hiring a diverse workforce. Radical changes are needed also in both the structure and the culture of most organizations—in their policies and practices, the skills and styles of their leaders, and day-to-day interactions among all their people.
Many organizations will fail to make these changes because the changes seem too radical. Those organizations will not survive. To many people and most organizations, diversity seems like a problem, not a solution. Differences are to be avoided, not embraced and utilized. Age-old hierarchies, traditions and biases must not be questioned or examined. To make these changes to embrace and capitalize on diversity will require a true breakthrough—an Inclusion Breakthrough.
The first step is to ensure that diversity is seen as mission critical. When the current and future success of the organization is tied directly to the need for diversity, it becomes a powerful tool for organizational change and higher performance. Making diversity mission critical conveys its urgent mature to every person in the organization and positions the organization to reap the benefits from leveraging that diversity.
An organization that leverages diversity enables all members of its workforce to utilize their full portfolio of skills and talents. It continually seeks to broaden its diversity to take advantage of new markets, new sources of innovation, and new pathways to success.
The Authors
Omni-Working: Work effectively in all ways, from all places
Gwen Stirling-Wilkie
About Omni-Working
Providing leaders with guidance to figure out new ways of working and transcend ‘hybrid’ working to deliver results.
The world of work dramatically changed during the pandemic and set off a series of societal trends and organisational changes. These trends continue to evolve and present leaders with situations they’ve never faced before. Working environments have changed for ever. The office has shifted from being ‘the’ place to work, to being ‘a’ place to work.
Where to work is only one part of creating competitive advantage through high performance flexibility. This book addresses the how of modern working, providing an innovative solution to one of the biggest problems currently facing organisations, namely: What is the best model of flexible and distributed working for our organisation?
This is a complex situation impacting the culture and reaching every corner of an organisation. The book features the author’s unique concept, the Omni-Working Framework: seven elements that each contribute to creating a strategy that increases autonomy, builds trust, and empowers managers. It is not a one-size fits all solution and requires multiple approaches in the way people connect, collaborate, communicate, and are enabled to deliver results.
How people work is the most important conversation for leaders to have. Gwen Stirling-Wilkie provides pragmatic guidance to help them review the working practices that underpin how work gets done. She gives ideas on how to draw on everyone’s experience to create engaged teams who can do their best work; to refresh and reimagine the models of work needed for modern work.
The future of work is becoming clearer, but we aren’t there yet. Smart leaders are listening to their people as they navigate the nonsense and evolve new models of work to become the best omni-working organisation they can be.
Come together with intention and purpose, not prescription.
oOo
It isn’t a theoretical or academic book, it is drawn from the author’s hands-on, 30-year career as a leader and organisational consultant. It includes vignettes from senior leaders actively trying to find solutions to the challenges they face to improve engagement, collaboration and performance. It seeks to find the best blend of where and how teams work most effectively for their organisation’s context.
The author’s first book, From Physical Place to Virtual Space – How to design and host transformative spaces online, was an Amazon bestseller and finalist in the 2022 UK Business Book Awards.
Gwen Stirling-Wilkie is a future of work expert and senior-level thinking partner based in the UK. She provides guidance and support for leaders as they redesign and recreate models of work.
‘In a world where flexibility and adaptability are paramount, and delivering sustainable profits are increasingly important, Gwen Stirling-Wilkie equips us with the knowledge and strategies needed to thrive, making this book a must-read for anyone fostering excellence in today’s workplace.’
Amanda Paxon, UK Country Manager Prescriptions Medicine, Consilient Health
The Author
Safe Enough to Soar
Judith H. Katz and Frederick A. Miller
About Safe Enough to Soar
Do you feel safe enough at work to share your ideas and thoughts? Raise tough issues? Deal with conflicts? Do your best work?
Best-selling authors and renowned organizational consultants Fred Miller and Judith Katz announce the publication of their newest book which outlines the four levels of Interaction Safety and how to create organizations safe enough for everyone to soar.
Many people feel unsafe in work interactions. They hold back, hesitate, and make themselves smaller out of fear of ridicule or retribution. The lack of interaction safety is why new ideas and new people often have such a hard time succeeding in today's organizations, and directly contribute to why stress levels are so high. Many people have the skills they need to do their best work and the ideas to solve problems, but lack the safety to apply them.
This book describes what constitutes a safe environment and the actions―by both leaders and team members―necessary to create collaborative, inclusive workplaces in which people feel safe enough to be their best selves.
Written in plain, everyday language, Safe Enough to Soar: Accelerating Trust, Inclusion, and Collaboration in the Workplace identifies the default mindsets and behaviors that create hostile work environments and block collaboration, engagement, and partnership. The book provides a simple, step-by-step process that will enable organization's individuals, work-groups, and teams to move past the dysfunctional mire of defensiveness, micro-aggressions, cover-your-ass compromises, and judging; and launch them into the innovation-inspiring, collaboration-fostering zone of organizational bravery.
When people feel safe enough to act and interact, they step up, speak up, and fully engage...and they and their organizations spread their wings and soar.
The Authors
The Illusion of Inclusion
Helen Turnbull, Ph.D.
Abstract
We may say we want to be inclusive, but what if we really don’t? What if our brains are hard-wired for selfishness and similarity and not for diversity and altruism?
Having a diverse workforce is no guarantee that the work environment is inclusive. Companies hire for diversity and manage for similarity. We hire people for their difference and then teach them directly and indirectly what they have to do to fit in to the corporate culture.
The Illusion of Inclusion exposes a myriad of diverse reasons why people are not more fully engaged and offers you the key to unlock the “Geometry of Inclusion”.
The Illusion of Inclusion takes the lid off Pandora’s Box and explores the complexity of inclusion; where affinity bias or “mini-me” syndrome and the need to fit in are unconsciously blocking our ability to be inclusive. The book offers a road map and an easy to comprehend model on how to minimize the impact of unconscious and conscious biases in order to embed an inclusive organizational culture.
Author Biography
From Physical Place to Virtual Space
Gwen Stirling-Wilkie
About From Physical Place to Virtual Space
From Physical Place to Virtual Space describes the insights and conclusions of a highly experienced Dialogic Organization Development practitioner bringing her skills to a new client, all online. From initial contact, designing and sequencing the interventions, to a series of online events for a large multi-divisional corporation, Gwen Stirling-Wilke takes you through the differences that make a difference in doing Dialogic OD in virtual spaces. She introduces her ‘Transformative Spaces Online’ Framework to help adjust the foundation stones of your practice.
The book is in two parts.
Part 1: Preparing The Virtual Space
The first part of the book has new models, tools, and insights for using virtual platforms like Zoom - useful for anyone, from beginners to seasoned experts. Gwen guides in how to design differently for virtual space.
Part 2: Mastering Virtual Consulting
The second part of the book goes into detail on virtual consulting; effective group work, working with group energy online, Use of Self, and how to adapt dialogic OD methods online.
A virtual consulting case study:
The book concludes with a full description of a case of virtual consulting with a new client at the start of the pandemic, one that was not familiar with working through virtual platforms. The client wanted to embark on a cultural change process and create greater integration between five distinct businesses within the company, and decided they could not wait for the pandemic to be over.
We watch the emergence of new and novel groupings to explore a shared topic in ways they hadn’t before. New narratives travelled through the formal and informal networks within and between businesses. These included stories of people being invited to take part whose voices were not normally heard, opening up to the possibility of a different way of leading. The entire process generated new ways of working, new relationships, and new possibilities for future collaboration across the company, as well as a new image of leadership that was attractive and stimulated new actions. A collective experience of previously unimagined ways of thinking, creating, and acting together stimulated an explosion of innovation.
Praise for ‘From Physical Place to Virtual Space’
“If you are curious as to how to continue to do effective group work, how to design transformative events, how to host an online event with ‘presence' and most important of all, how to keep participation a core element of any online intervention, then this is a crucial developmental book for you. This book is a timely and significant contribution to the field.”
Dr Mee-Yan Cheung Judge, founder of Quality & Equality. HR Magazine in UK top influential thinker list in 2018, 2019.
The Author
Intervention Science (Interventionswissenschaft)
Roland J. Schuster
Book Description
Theory and practice of a special kind of science
Intervention science has the potential to facilitate sustainable change. Roland J. Schuster provides a comprehensive insight into the theory, practice, and history of this special form of science. From a transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspective, the volume explores the meaning of knowledge and consciousness in relation to human perception and communication.
Seven research examples show how event design, didactic interventions and group reflections can open new ways of thinking - for more creativity in practice, research, and teaching.
Most of the book is written in German. However, there are three chapters in English.
Chapter 7, p. 161-187
Chapter 9, p. 215-237
Chapter 13, p. 297-314
Author Biography
Handbook of Personnel Development: The Practice of Staff Training, Staff Advancement, and Work Structuring.
Jürgen Radel
Book Description
Still, corporate personnel development often operates without a strategy, clinging to old tools. Changes resulting from the pandemic have primarily affected the way of working, less so the content. Personnel development continues to undergo significant changes. Especially in the context of digitalization and diversity, some tools, approaches, nomenclature, and models have been added or modified.
The aim of the book is to provide a forward-looking and practice-oriented contribution to answering the pressing questions in personnel development, with the help of clear systematization. The book offers guidance on the mechanisms of various tools and gathers topics that can be used in a unified competency model by HR professionals. Includes downloadable material on myBook+.
Author Biography
The Power of Agency
Judith H. Katz and Frederick A. Miller
About The Power of Agency
Take ownership of your work and unleash the power of agency in your organization!
To help give employees the power, influence, and voice necessary to truly excel in their workplace, organizational development experts Miller and Katz reveal the importance of agency and offer practical advice on how to achieve it.
With more knowledge workers entering the workplace, many are being stifled by traditional employee-manager relationships that hamper their ability to fully contribute and feel engaged at work. And in a constantly changing and competitive world of work, organizations must evolve to keep up with worker satisfaction or else face a decrease in performance and loss in talent.
The solution? Enabling your employees to exercise their individual agency in the workplace. Through an actionable roadmap that highlights common pitfalls and practical steps necessary for establishing a culture of greater agency, this book will provide individuals, teams, managers, and leaders with concrete ways to clarify their current level of agency and identifies specific actions they can take to exercise greater agency.