Via: Orchestrating Pluralistic Networks - Thriving In A Networked World
Following my prior post Fall Events: Serious Games That Make Leaders, Dr. Fernando Flores and colleagues will be leading another powerful program that prepares participants to prosper in globally dispersed, multicultural and multidisciplinary work groups and to master what they call The Orchestration of Commitments in Pluralistic Networks.
Go On Virtual Missions With Your Team In Strange And Exciting Environments
Their curriculum combines the use of a virtual environment with their proven methodology for helping people and organizations become more cohesive, more productive and more resilient to a world of work that is ever in flux. They have created a powerful social laboratory for rapidly developing the embodied learning of skills that are critical to succeeding in pluralistic networks -- groups composed of diverse people with different backgrounds and concerns who come together and make commitments to each other as they work to achieve a common purpose.
They use a multi-player serious game as a learning environment for people to immerse themselves in real team work, observe each other in action, experience and resolve problems as they arise, and recurrently observe and practice the new distinctions that are introduced.
The program begins with an intensive an intensive 3-day conference currently led by founder, Dr. Fernando Flores. During the conference, Dr. Flores leads a discussion exploring what it means to live and work in pluralistic networks, and the need to shift our education away from the “acquisition of knowledge” and “application of concepts” towards a focus on embodied learning and cultivation of new abilities that are critical for our world today.
Throughout the three days, participants engage in hands-on group exercises using a virtual reality game environment, and emerge not only with a new awareness of themselves and the skills they need to cultivate, but also with a sense of ambition as they begin to articulate a personal roadmap for learning to navigate in the world of pluralistic networks.
For those who wish to continue the immersive experience, they offer a four-month online interactive program utilizing virtual environments and VOIP. These tools make possible a new kind of pedagogy that is freed from the bounds of time and space, and that creates a complex social network within which students can learn new abilities while in action with others. . The focus of this program is to increase each participants' ability to invent their world with others, and become more effective in the way they lead and work with other people.
In multiple programs with working professionals on both coasts of the United States, in Europe, Latin America and Asia, they report encouraging results.
Join them for three days or four months to find out more, and for the opportunity to learn in a lively, hands-on, interactive environment.
They look forward to playing with you!
Introductory Session: 3 day Workshop
• Los Angeles, January 27th - 29th, 2010
Working Effectively in Small Teams: 4 Month Program
• Kick-off: February 2010
Early Bird Registration: by January 1st, 2010.
If you would like to participate, please send an e-mail to:
Or call +1 510 710 7241
About Business Design Associates and Pluralistic Networks - A New Kind of Education
Fernando Flores, Ph.D. Founder, Business Design Associates and Pluralistic Networks, was born in Talca, Chile. He became finance minister in the government of Chilean president Salvador Allende and then spent three years as a political prisoner after the military coup of General Augusto Pinochet. Forced into exile, after negotiations on his behalf by Amnesty International, he moved with his family to Palo Alto, California, and worked as a researcher in the Computer Science department at Stanford University. He subsequently obtained his PhD at UC Berkeley where he developed his work on philosophy, coaching and workflow technology.
For more than 25 years, Fernando Flores and team have provided some of the world’s largest companies with training to improve coordination within teams, to build trust across value chains and to take care of the concerns of their customers and stakeholders alike. As a result of their research over the past two years, they are confident they can use new technologies to very quickly teach people the skills necessary to thrive in a networked world.
Serving as corporate consultant, his clients are large companies and organizations in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Chile, Italy, Sweden, France and Switzerland, among others.
His outstanding publications to date include:
“Understanding Computers and Cognition – A New Foundation For Design”, 1987, written with Terry Winograd;
“Building Trust in Business, Politics, Relationships and Life”, 2003, written with Robert C. Solomon;
“Disclosing New Worlds - Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity”, 1999, written with Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa. Now he teaches companies how to use assessments and commitments to transform the way they do business.