Clean Business Exchange 2008

The Clean Business Exchange (19 and 20 November in West London) is for anyone who uses, or plans to use, Clean Language/Clean Space or Symbolic Modelling in an organisation of any kind, whether as an employee or as an outside consultant, or in your own business. The Exchange is a powerful networking opportunity, ideal for sharing – and creating – ideas, tools and contacts with a group of like-minded people who share your enthusiasm for Clean.

This year's event includes a mix of plenary, themed and open space sessions. We're aiming to provide a positive, progressive environment for sharing experience and for ideas to emerge. Those who've attended our previous Exchanges have valued the quality of presentations, opportunities to network and brainstorm, and the unique energy that this event creates. We can guarantee that you'll come away with new material, new contacts, new projects in the making, and new thoughts on how to market and use all you've gained.

Networking is a key feature of the CBE; more than one consultancy will be actively looking for new associates at this event. And if you're in an organisation and interested in finding more ways to use Clean, there are excellent opportunities to meet up with other businesspeople who are using – and innovating with – Clean at work.

If you'd like to read all about our last Exchange event, you'll find the report here: http://www.cleanchange.co.uk/store/CleanLanguage/2008/08/10/building-better-businesses-with-clean/

Please note that this event is intended for people with some Clean training. 

Speakers and sessions

Day one: Wednesday 19 November

Wendy Nieuwland
Designing a 'Model the Master' programme: using Clean to learn from examples

The aim of a 'Model the Master' programme is to help organisations understand which qualities they want to see more of, and use the available qualities within (or just outside of) the organisation itself to develop these further. Based on an inspiring evening session from the 2008 Clean Summer School (to model modelling...), we designed a simple 4-phase programme which will result in participants:
• being much clearer about what qualities they want to develop further
• discovering established examples in people who represent these qualities
the named ‘master’ in this area finding out much more about this specific quality and developing it
• the approach to and experience of this quality becoming available for others
• discovering how modelling works and the added value of doing this Cleanly
• developing this quality in themselves by creating their own model of it.
This programme has been designed but not yet tested. This interactive session will use the joint brainpower of the CBE participants to explore and improve it. What can be added to this approach? How could we present this effectively to business?

Wendy Sullivan
Teams and metaphors galore

In this interactive session, we will focus on ways in which metaphor can be used – Cleanly and in other ways - to facilitate team-working, team-alignment and more, drawing on diverse experiences (ranging from corporate teams to spiritual communities) and also making use of your experience and/or suggestions. 
By the end of the session, you will have a broad range of ideas to inspire you when working with groups, some of which will apply to 1:1 work too.

Lynne Cooper
Creating Clean tools for business

Lynne will present one of many Clean tools used in Amicas leadership trainings, as an example of how to find Clean solutions to day-to-day business issues. You’ll then be invited to join in a creative session to brainstorm and develop new concepts in applying Clean to achieve everyday business outcomes.
You will learn how to adapt Clean Space to facilitate people to improve their influence in complex organisational situations. More importantly, you’ll explore how to think laterally to find many more uses of Clean in business. In this session you will be challenged to think creatively as you explore innovative and pragmatic ways to apply Clean Language, Clean Space and Emergent Knowledge in relatively small-scale, highly pragmatic ways in business to support clients to make performance improvements. A practical, hands-on session.

Jenny Johnson
Structured metaphor-building

Clean Language and the use of Metaphor are comparatively recent additions to the world of training and development. Yet those of us who are constantly working in this field can testify to the brilliance of a combined approach. During this seminar, we will explore the following:
• How the development of metaphor can be made accessible to everyone via PEP Lite
• ‘Thin Slicing’ personality to aid effective coaching methodology
• Clean Language as a development tool when working with a structured introduction to metaphor
• How to convince a Creative Director and Finance Director alike! Left and right brain accessibility.
You will be given a chance to experience part of the model for yourselves as well as learning about one longitudinal case study in an international headhunting firm when PEP Lite, Clean Language coaching and team metaphors were used in both an individual and team context.
This will enable you to consider the use of a structured ‘metaphor building’ approach as a precedent to Clean Language ‘intervention’. This is also a chance to discover an alternative way to benefit from the use of metaphor by using it as a basis for personality assessment, whilst retaining individuality of personal landscape.

Cheryl Winter
GROW Clean 

Delegates will benefit from this session by:
• Practising the skills of Clean setup and Clean feedback
• Sharing their thoughts on blending the basic questions of Clean into the GROW coaching model
• Identifying a few tips for meeting the clients’ needs to train Clean with their current programmes.

Day two: Thursday 20 November

Judy Rees
Your proposed application of Clean is like  ... what?

Let's use the resources we have in the room! This session provides a structured space for developing ideas for applications of Clean. We will:
• use our Clean facilitation skills to develop metaphors for personal applications, and
• draw on our own experiences to provide feedback, suggestions, and connections to resources.
By taking the two roles of facilitator and advisor at various times during the session we'll also be exploring and experimenting with the boundary between 'Clean' and 'not-Clean', and discovering our own signals for what works best for us, and when.

Annemiek van Helsdingen
Researching experience to create meaning and take action

Whenever there are many people whose opinions and experience are vital for a project or programme, this distinctive method, based on Clean, gets excellent results.
Devised by Stefan Ouboter (a consultant who specialised in environmental issues and methods spurring public participation) in conjunction with Gewoon aan de Slag, this approach combines Clean interviews, participant ‘soundbites’ and feedback, and facilitated group discussions, to help create meaningful understanding across a large group of people. It results in:
• increased individual understanding for project (and other) stakeholders, resulting in shared meaning
• clearly defined steps for going forward (What would we like to have happen next?)
• increased engagement and enthusiasm – even when there are big clashes in personal interests between different stakeholders.
We’ve applied this approach with success in numerous contexts, including re-purposing of parks and inner city land use and major government-funded research programmes. We know from client responses that those who’ve taken part become strong advocates and actively look for other ways of applying it!

Margaret Meyer
Your ideal business plan is like … what?

All too often, strategic planning – whether for business, projects or services – misses the mark. That team planning awayday or project brainstorm generates all kinds of inspiring but fuzzy visions … or it gets derailed by too much detail too soon.
What’s missing is the happy medium: a simple but focussed business plan that encapsulates the where (vision), what (results) and how (enablers).
Using Clean together with the European Excellence Model, a practical tool with proven success in helping teams and organisations (both private and public sector) to plan and measure their pathway to excellence, this experiential session will draw on the expertise in the room to develop, test and explore applications of a truly Clean planning tool.

Terri McNerney
Clean and Appreciative Inquiry – How can they work together?

'Appreciative Inquiry' describes a revolutionary new change strategy that inspires people and brings about a higher performance level in any organization. It builds on what works well when you are at your best, rather than focusing on what's going wrong.
It is a great process for large group interventions, accelerating positive organization change by involving a broad range of internal and external stakeholders in the change process.
In this session you will:
• experience a mini AI process
• see how Clean Language and Clean Space can work well with it
• learn a great process to work with large groups.

Caitlin Walker
Marketing integrity

When asked how we've built up a business based on doing work we love we often say flippantly that we just be ourselves and meet people who like us. Another way of describing this is that we model coming from a position of integrity, and hold ourselves and prospective clients to it. This means that when someone asks us ‘Can you ....?’, we model their request, just as we would any therapy or coaching client. We ask where the request is coming from, why it’s even an outcome. We explore their problem and move them to outcome, helping them find out how they really want things to be. We explore the original pitch and explain code-congruence and explore with them how the way we could work with them should be an example of the outcome not the problem. We also make it very clear that we will only take on work that we believe has integrity and is sustainable.
While this means we may not win that pitch, what usually happens is that the potential client goes away, reflects on what came out of the meeting and comes back with a larger piece of work which might just actually get them what they want.
This workshop is about having a model for your business integrity and then practising modelling in the moment with clients to help them find theirs and to check whether the two are congruent.

James Lawley
Summing up: how Clean adds value to business

Speaker Biographies

Lynne Cooper is a skilled change facilitator with ten years’ experience in consultancy and facilitation, following 18 years in commercial roles. Lynne’s key areas of expertise are in Executive Coaching, leadership development, team alignment, strategic vision development and group facilitations, with a focus on performance improvement. Lynne uses Clean Language, NLP and other change methodologies in her work with clients to support them to achieve their outcomes in the business context. She has a passion for supporting people to achieve, a very pragmatic approach to how she works and a determination to get results. She is the co-creator, with Mariette Castellino, of the Five-Minute Coach, a powerful Clean Language coaching model for use at all levels in organisations, and the author of Business NLP for Dummies (Wiley, 2008).

Annemiek van Helsdingen has been working as a consultant, trainer and coach for the last ten years. Her focus is on facilitating change and development in organisations and teams, reviewing business needs, available resources within the client system and what needs to happen so that sustainable change is the result. Annemiek has recently relocated to the UK from Holland.

Jenny Johnson has been Managing Director of Red Rocks Consulting Limited since its inception. The company holds the exclusive licence for the distribution and sale of PEP Lite which is a metaphor-based personality profiling tool. This provides individuals with the ability to create a metaphorical landscape in a standardised way and yet retain an individual approach. This can then form the basis of coaching sessions, which are conducted using Clean Language (with a little directional coaching for good measure!)
Prior to this, Jenny worked for 13 years for an international recruitment company, latterly as Head of Training and Development, yet held other roles there as well including Recruitment Manager and Coach. Her experience is wide-ranging and includes the implementation of a Competency framework into the organisation, Investors in People accreditation, e-learning strategy, creation of a management development programme, compiling the Training Strategy and allocating the Budget.
Jenny is qualified as a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (FCIPD), as well as holding a Certificate and Diploma in Coaching, B.A. (Hons.) in French and Geography and, last yet not least, an F.A. football coaching certificate.

James Lawley, together with Penny Tompkins, is a co-developer of Symbolic Modelling and a leading authority on the use of self-originated metaphor for personal and professional development. He and Penny run The Developing Company and their book, Metaphors in Mind is a comprehensive guide to Symbolic Modelling. 

Terri McNerney specialises in leadership, team and organisation development and coaching. She has more than 20 years’ experience with Global 500 companies. She has consulting experience in a variety of industries including petrochemical, broadcasting, pharmaceutical, energy, telecommunications, and general merchandising, as well as government and education sectors.

Margaret Meyer is a social researcher, change consultant and therapist, following a career in the arts, publishing and public sector management. She has held senior management roles with the UK’s largest disability charity and with the British Council, where she had responsibility for its international literature programmes. A certified Clean Language Facilitator, she uses Clean and Symbolic Modelling across the span of her work, from research to coaching to outcomes evaluation, facilitating clients to take active steps towards realizing their objectives, in both business and private contexts. 

Wendy Nieuwland is a change facilitator, trainer and coach with 12 years of experience in a rich variety of profit and non-profit organisations. Her main focus is on the systemic nature of changes and professional/organisational development, in which applying Clean Language and Symbolic Modelling plays an ever bigger role; often combined with other tools and approaches to create the best fit and optimal results.
Wendy partners with Annemiek van Helsdingen and Maaike Nooitgedagt at Gewoon aan de slag, based in the Netherlands.

Judy Rees is a former news reporter and media executive who co-owns West London-based Clean Change Company (www.cleanchange.co.uk) with Wendy Sullivan. She has been instrumental in developing and highlighting many potential applications of Clean Language beyond coaching and therapy. She uses Clean with individuals and groups in sales and marketing, interviewing, online networking, and in personal, team and business development.

Wendy Sullivan is a specialist international trainer of Clean Language and Symbolic Modelling who has worked with the founders of that field – David Grove, Penny Tompkins and James Lawley– for more than eight years. Her students span five continents and include private individuals and corporate clients, who use these powerful approaches in personal development and to improve communication, relationships and business success. She is a registered psychotherapist and a certified trainer of NLP who, with Judy Rees, runs West London-based Clean Change Company (www.cleanchange.co.uk). They are the creators of Clean Change Cards and the authors of Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors
and Opening Minds, due to be published by Crown House in November 2008.

Caitlin Walker is a managing director of Training Attention Ltd. The company has designed and delivered a range of large-scale clean modelling projects over the last 10 years, including:
• Diversity work at an NHS trust of 900
• Start-up training for a Welfare to Work company, which went on to double job outcome figures and has expanded throughout the UK and Europe
• Designing the use of Clean Questions in police video interviewing of vulnerable witnesses.
Most of our associates are currently working in the welfare-to-work sector in Brent and have a job outcome rate of 68% for our systemic modelling courses. Caitlin is currently involved at Liverpool John Moores University working to create a learning system across one faculty. This may be the first Masters-level course in Clean Coaching.

Cheryl Winter worked extensively in the Financial Services sector for over 15 years as a Training Consultant and Manager, specialising in team development, coaching and sales skills. Since joining Training Attention in 2006 she has managed projects in Clean Language with Wigan Extended Learning Team and NHS Executive Coaches. In 2009 she will be managing Training Attention Certification Process.
She continues to work with clients on a one-to-one basis and has introduced many of the Clean skills with clients such as Boots, Clynol Hair and E:ON.
Cheryl is trained to Master Practitioner NLP, Certified Clean Language Facilitator and a Fellow of the CIPD.