Reflections on Organizational Change: The Ancora Experience PSR COLLOQUIUM
Date: 06/04/2010
Presented by Jerry Lindauer, LCSW Clinical Instructor Department of Psychiatric Rehabilitation and Counseling Professions State Hospital Affiliation UMDNJ-SHRP “Reflections on Organizational Change: The Ancora Experience” In a recent Sunday NY Times magazine article, Rahm Emmanuel, White House Chief of Staff, was quoted as saying, “Transformation requires attending to the continual tension between getting things done within the system and changing the system.” This is also our own important challenge as consultants, trainers, educators and professional leaders, at a time when calls for transformation abound but evidence for them is thin. (See the New Freedom Commission Report and the NJ Wellness and Recovery Transformation Plan). State psychiatric hospitals are a good place to experience the challenges of “changing the system”, partly because the “system” is such a dominant and pervasive presence. In this symposium, I hope I can shed light on and stimulate discussion about the cultural element of system change- what organizational culture is, where it comes from, how to make it more tangible and thus workable for consultant and staff, implications for our work as change agents, how to look at culture from a “trauma-informed” perspective and the relationship of culture at an organizational level to “recovery” at the person to person service level.
