The document review portion is the first portion of the Sociosystemic Organizational Development process. This portion involves your organization providing us with any relevant documents you have that pertain or allude to the nature diversity, equity, and inclusion in your workplace. Some examples of these documents might be: Employee Handbook, Mission, Vision, & Values statements, Websites, Social media pages, Organizational Charts, and Employee Demographics. From here, our team of experts will review and analyze your materials over the next few months and provide you with a SCOLA Report - our own unique version of a SWOT Analysis. This report will provide you with a professional opinion and estimation of the ways in which your employees, existing clients/members, potential clients/members, and even competition might be receiving the information inferred by the language in your documents. The report will offer recommendations on how to make immediate and long term adjustments.

In order to ground your SPFDI, your organization/institution will need a set of values or foci centered around equity and inclusion if you don't yet have them. In this process, we will isolate and identify some of the key areas your organization/institution should prioritize regarding diversity, equity, & inclusion and help develop a set of values or foci in an effort to provide an overarching framework to ground the SPFDI.

The SPFDI recognizes that organizational health, success, and overall longevity has everything to do with its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Through this unique strategic plan, your organization will be able to increase their diversity & inclusion efforts and outcomes in a short period of time. With three preset goals and comprehensive expected results, your organization will have the perfects mix of direction and flexibility it needs to make a diversity plan right for you.

An integral part of any  organizational assessment is the ability to hear from the community at large. In both, our 6 month and 1 year packages, we offer two unique opportunities for members of your organizational community to have their voices heard in and included in the larger SsOD process. The results of each process are completely 100% anonymous.

1. Focus Groups

   • Focus Groups are intimate group discussions between our Visceral Change team and your organization's institution's, or department's strategic team, such as a committee, working group, student club or association, affinity or employee resource group, or a departmental taskforce. This is our chance to get a sense of what has been going well for your group and what you could improve on. 

2. Open Dialogue​

   • Open Dialogues are larger group discussions between our Visceral Change team and the larger organizational or institutional community. Those who are not members of a committee, working group, or a task force (and therefore, unable to participate in a Focus Group) are welcome to participate in an Open Dialogue. This includes (but is not limited to) students, staff, board members, and community stakeholders.

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Each discussion can hold up to three meetings with our Visceral Change team for a total of 6 group conversations; that's up to 3 Focus Groups and up to 3 Open Dialogues during our visit. If you have more strategic teams than you have need for an open dialogue, then you can certainly customize so that your needs are met here. An example of this would be: instead of 3 Focus Groups and 3 Open Dialogues, maybe you do 4 Focus groups and 2 Open Dialogues, or 5 Focus Groups and 1 Open Dialogue - or vice versa!

After a period of six months, your organization will receive our Sociosystemic Organizational Development Final Report. This report will be the second report you receive from us (the first being the SCOLA Report) and will be the most robust. Inside the Final Report will be the anonymous results from the interview and survey, our SsOD Rubric and Scorecard detailing which type of organization you are (Homogenous, Diverse, Multicultural, Sociosystemic) and providing insight regarding how we determined your placement, and finally, a series of recommendations on how to move forward.

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For efficiency and ideal effectiveness, organizations should view the Final Report and the SCOLA Report as one document when processing the recommendations provided for "Next Steps." 

At the heart of our One-Year process is our Sociosystemic Governance Framework, which is bound together - along with your Strategic Plan - by our Sociosystemic Constitution (SsC; Ss Constitution). What separates Visceral Change from the rest of the organizational development consultancies out there is our unique and deliberate approach to the development process. As a systems-centered organization, we center our work around the laws of behavior, recognizing that in order for sociosystems (or, sustainable DEI) to exist in your workplace, you first have to make sure your organizational design and behavior align. Our Sociosystemic Constitution is a binding document that, by design, ties these two things together for you. Grounded in Federal theory and modeled off of the United States Constitution, the Ss Constitution is the only document of its kind that uniquely serves this purpose for organizations and institutions.

The Strategic Plan is the final component to our One-Year organizational development process. Where the Sociosystemic Governance Framework speaks to the organizational design of your workplace, the Strategic Plan inevitably speaks to your organizational behavior. Working in concert with the rest of the Constitution (as part of the Constitution), the Strategic Plan is the place where we begin to create5 Pillars (or, goals) to begin putting our sociosystemic design into practice. Although this plan is relatively straight forward, it is complex, in some ways, and there is a lot more to it, so you're definitely going to want to check out our section on the Sociosystemic Governance Framework as soon as you're ready for more info!