Peter Dickens is an internationally recognized speaker, facilitator and strategist. His easy-going style, vivid imagery and broad experience help bring complex issues into sharp focus.

For 15 years, Peter has provided organizational development leadership and advice to a wide range of private, public and social sector organizations. For the past three years, Peter was Vice President: Organizational Development at Trillium Health Centre, Canada’s most successful hospital merger. Peter was responsible for the rapid development of an organizational culture that is driven by a commitment to excellence and service. In the process, Peter also helped forge a learning culture that contributed to Trillium’s being named as one of Canada’s "Top 100 Employers" by McLean’s magazine.

He is recognized for his unique ability to facilitate strategic planning while concurrently developing the leadership skills, attitudes and behaviors that support the emerging strategic plan.

"There are many good planning processes available," says Dickens "and there are good leadership development programs. I believe that what I bring to a client is a unique capacity to develop both concurrently. People develop a really exciting new direction for their organization, but without a change in leadership style their efforts often go for naught. By the same token, leadership development can’t occur in a vacuum. It must contribute to strategy if it is going to be meaningful."

Peter has developed an approach he calls Strategic Renewal™ that is:

Fact-Based

Ensuring that decisions are grounded in a clear understanding of the current reality - not on mythology or rumor.

Customer-Focused

Every organization must have a purpose beyond its own survival. This means developing a service culture that focuses on meeting the needs of internal and external customers, partners and suppliers with equal vigor.

Internally Supported

The only way to truly establish and sustain a service culture is to invest every relationship, whether with the end-user recipient of the service or with internal staff, with the same effort and commitment.

Strategic Renewal is a multiphase approach that is customized to the specific issues and opportunities of the client company. Typically, this includes:

Organizational Capacity Assessment

This is typically done through a series of interviews and focus group discussions with management, staff, customers and other stakeholders. At the end of this initial phase, I synthesize the results into a formal ‘state of the organization’ document that clearly articulates both the objective and perceptual reality that I have experienced.

Communication Strategy

It is impossible to overestimate the need for an effective communication strategy through a process like this. Management, staff and other stakeholders will have an ever increasing appetite to understand the results of the process in order be able to internalize the implications for themselves.

Strategic Direction

In a world of rapid, unprecedented change, organizations large and small must develop a clear common understanding of who they are, what they are all about and where they need to focus in order to thrive, not just survive. To do this, I work with a team that is representative of the organization to clarify the core commitments. This includes:

• Your Core Purpose
• Your Core Values
• Your Vision

Giving formal definition to these key positioning statements is the first step. It should be a highly participatory process that engages all internal and external stakeholders. Time spent here will have a significant impact on the quality and effectiveness

Strategic Planning

Vision without definition and detail is perhaps the most frustrating by-product of an incomplete process of renewal. Once the strategic direction has been established, effective facilitators will help you articulate:

• A clear concise Mission Statement that defines the first major milestone that must be achieved if you are to make noticeable progress towards the Vision.
• The 4 - 6 factors critical to the successful achievement of the Mission
• Clear Goals which are necessary and sufficient to achieve the Mission
• Clear definition of the core competencies needed to achieve results

It is important to recognize that I am a strategist and whole systems thinker rather than an expert in the specifics of any given business. However, while I assume that there will be more than sufficient expertise within your organization, if we need to draw in specific expertise, I am usually able to do so. Certainly in a health care environment I have the support of a very capable team of clinical and administrative experts. I believe I am at my best when I act as an agent provocateur, challenging your thinking and ensuring that the plan that emerges has been carefully assessed and reflects the needs and best thinking of your entire organization.

Action Planning

In a world of rapid change, staff at all levels must develop the skills the respond to those changes in an effective way. I can help your people learn to "think strategically": responding quickly to opportunities and challenges while keeping their focus on the mission and goals of the organization or of their team.

Skills Development

The process of Strategic Renewal™ frequently surfaces the need to develop new skills to ensure the effective implementation of the strategic plan. I have developed a series of workshops that assists formal and informal leaders develop the mental models, skills and attitudes to drive change in the organization. These include:

Redefining the Context: Leveraging Chaos

Most of us seem to live and work in organizations designed from very linear images of a world operating as some vast machine. We manage things by separating them into parts; analyzing the parts and then hoping we can put the pieces back together without significant loss. The assumption seems to be that by understanding the workings of each piece, we can understand and control the whole. This is a view of the world that focuses on things rather than relationships, function rather than purpose. If we are to continue to draw from science to shape our context, it makes sense to explore the emerging science of our times. Our new understandings of the world around us direct us to see the organization as a whole system in which we give primary value to the relationships that exist between each of the elements within the system. In this highly interactive workshop, I will assist participants in seeing the world through a different lens: a lens of complexity in which opportunity emerges out of the chaotic environment in which we work when we are aligned around a clear, compelling vision and sense of purpose for the organization.

Reframing Our Planning Paradigm

Most of us seem to live and work in organizations in which we engage in complex, linear planning processes for a world we desperately hope will be predictable, and we continually search for better ways of objectively measuring, understanding and managing our world. The reality is, planning strategies must change if they are going to continue to be useful and relevant. We have traditionally engaged in planning processes that are based on a strategy I would characterize as review and redo. In other words, we simply looked backwards at what we did over the last few years and tried to do more of, at less cost and with better outcomes. While this may be effective at an operational level, at a strategic level we must make the shift to what I would describe as a paradigm of reflection and readiness. The assumption that underpins this approach is that the future is not only unpredictable it is highly volatile. Opportunities will come and go quickly, and we must be in a position to seize them when they occur. This workshop will help all members of the organization understand and embrace a much more fluid approach to planning, ultimately making the shift from focusing on a strategic plan that is a document frozen in time to strategic thinking, a process orientation that empowers every member of the team.

Making Sense of GenX

If organizations are to survive in the 21^st century they must understand the extraordinary social shift that is underway. We are moving – or have moved out of – a modernist or enlightenment worldview into something that can only be described as postmodern. At the same time, we are seeing the influence of Generation X, the first generation of the Postmodern period. Who are GenX? The term, coined by Vancouver writer Doug Copeland, generally describes the children of Baby Boomers. GenX has seen its economic future change before its eyes and most believe themselves to be facing a bleak economic future summarized by Copeland’s term McJobs. The implications for retention and recruitment are profound. If leaders do not come to terms with the fundamental shit in expectations that has taken place, they risk alienating younger staff and causing significant rifts between generations. This may be the most important challenge leaders face over the next ten years.

Mastering Change

It is often said that people hate change: the truth is that people are largely ill equipped to understand change or to find ways to turn it to their advantage. Given the appropriate framework and skills, people can become true ChangeMasters, developing an attitude that sees change as the point of leverage by which they gain competitive advantage rather than an excuse for inaction. In this workshop, participants will be introduced to the ChangeMaster Cycle™, a process model that guides them through the four phases of mastering change. They will also come to understand the triggers that cause them and others to ‘bail out’ from transformational change and revert to traditional behaviors. Armed with this knowledge, they can develop the skills and tools to stay the course. This process has been used in organizations large and small to create a common language around change, creating an environment or culture that truly thrives on change.

The Leadership Paradox

What makes a great leader? Is it vision and drive? Empathy and nurturing? Ethics? Street smarts? The ability to achieve outstanding results? The ability to release the potential of others? Is leadership a formal position or is it a capacity that needs to be developed throughout the organization? Everywhere you look today you see conflicting strategies for leadership success. In the very diversity of advice lies the paradox - and the secret. Effective leaders today are masters of situational analysis. They have the skills and tools to quickly assess situations and people and adapt their behavior to ensure maximum effect. Leadership polarity is a significant issue in organizations trying to operate at high speed in an unpredictable environment. Over time, we each develop style preferences. Some leaders by nature or circumstance are extremely outcome-oriented breakthrough leaders. They have the capacity and skill to challenge others to go with them through significant thresholds or barriers. Other leaders are more people or process-oriented enabling leaders. Driven by our behavioral styles, cultural influences and history, we often develop mental models at one extreme or another. Effective leadership requires that we regularly reexamine both the content and context of what we doing as leaders. In this workshop we will begin to develop a personal leadership strategy that ensures people can optimize their contribution to the organizations success.