Our special event with Barry and Karen Oshry proved to be engaging, stimulating and very provocative. With interactive simulations, lectures, discussion and personal journalling, fifty of us explored Oshry's ideas on the dynamics of power within organizational systems.

Barry and Karen Oshry have spent the last thirty years looking at the typical patterns among individuals at the top, middle, and bottom places within organizations. Their experience with groups, including their reflections, experiments, and refinements have led to an elegant and useful model The Power and Systems simulation enables the participant to learn about the model first hand. The Oshry's adapted their typical week-long workshop to a two day session during which we were able to experience and reflect on the patterns that emerged in each of the relative positions.

At the outset, each of us was assigned to the Top, Middle or Bottom role. Those assigned to the top place experienced the tremendous complexity and ambiguity of that role, and those at the bottom experience the profound desperation that accompanies the inability to have an impact on your situation. The dilemma of the middle was painfully experienced as being torn between the tops and bottoms. For those of us who work in or with organizations on a regular basis, the simulation resembled reality all too well.

After the simulation we debriefed our experience and explored the nature of systems, and the human beings within them, which create these dynamics. Barry shared his ideas about what people can do to break predictable and destructive patterns. Briefly, they are:

• Tops need to create responsibility at lower levels in the organization, and on a regular basis come together to revitalize their sense of common mission;
• Bottoms need to give up blaming others for their situation and take responsibility for every part of their world that can potentially be influenced;
• Middles need to get out of the middle by maintaining a solid sense of identity, i.e., not representing the tops or bottoms, and facilitate change and dialogue between tops and bottoms;
• and, everyone within the system needs to view themselves as participating in the creation of what the system is and where it’s going.

These concepts and more are spelled out in Oshry's 1995 book: Seeing Systems: Unlocking the Mysteries of Organizational Life, Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Because this program was so well received, the Special Events Committee is coordinating a week-tong certification course in July and/or September 1999. Again, spaces are limited so we need to plan ahead. Please call Ilene Wasserman if you are interested at 610-667-5305,

In addition, a special interest group is being established for people interested in applications of the Oshry model to organizations and their work.

The first meeting will be held at llene Wasserman's house on May 27, 1999 from 5:30-7:30 p.m., Call 610-667-5305 for more information and directions or contact her at iwass@aol.com.

-Kim Eberbach and Ilene Wasserman