We spent a day with Chuck Isen, a legendary Organizational Development consultant. With 25 years of "transformational consulting" under his belt, Chuck is an expert in the optimization of individual and organizational communications systems. From his perspective, a culture is the cumulative effect of all of the conversations in the organization. In times of post-catastrophe growth, according to Isen, the most important thing is to clear the "junk" out of the communications system.

The entire arena of "communications improvement" is painfully difficult to quantify. Chuck represents the extreme end of OD and believes that communications and business processes can be decoupled while improving them. He says "The process doesn't matter if the communications are squirrely and works far more effectively when the communications are clean." After some soul searching, we're willing to agree. You simply can not build a powerful culture without clear effective communication patterns at the core.

If you are thinking about how to move your organization forward into the post-recession playing field, you might want to send Chuck an email to talk it over.

-John Sumser