Bonnie Wesorick, RN, MSN is the founder of the CPM Resource Center, and originator of the Clinical Practice Model and CPM Consortium. For the last two decades she has centered her practice around co-creating healthy, healing work cultures and an integrated health care system. Her diverse roles in practice, education and research have linked her with interdisciplinary staff, managers, educators, advanced practitioners, educators and researchers to improve work cultures and health care services. She has learned from and shared her wisdom with over 700 diverse organizations within and beyond the health care arena. She is an internationally known speaker, author, and visionary in the field of health care. She has worked with a variety of health care settings including hospitals, clinics, schools, extended care, home care and community services. Bonnie brings a sense of direction and hope in the midst of today's chaos. She connects with the hearts and minds of others through her continuous field work with small and large groups, presentations, story telling, workshops, audio and videotapes and numerous publications including six books. She is often a key note or featured speaker at local, state and national conferences across the continent.
Laurie has over 20 years of education and experience in the health care arena including clinical and management roles. She has successfully used the CPM framework for creating healthy work cultures in all of these roles and has been a primary consultant at the CPM Resource Center since 1994. Laurie works with those who assume many different roles in health care and community leadership. She specializes in: supporting managers and executives in their role transitions, assisting organizations in practical ways to achieve desired outcomes through large scale change, and supporting groups in using dialogue skills to effectively develop partnerships in the midst of diversity and change. She conducts workshops and experiences for those seeking to learn the discipline of dialogue and lead it in their organizations.
Other key workshops and presentations include; Authentic Leadership; Health Care Finances: Building Shared Accountability, Community skill building sessions for the public, Creating a Learning Space, Uncovering and celebrating your passion, and creating healthy work places. In addition she offers assessment and planning services to organizations. Laurie is a resource to many and she brings learning that focuses on the practical application of these key concepts to the areas of employee and client satisfaction, financial outcomes, leadership impacts, conflict management, team relationships and productivity and system design enhancements. She uniquely shares her passion through stories, poetry, and music and is the author of 4 books and a poetry/music CD. She lives with her husband and 3 children in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
She is an author of 4 books: Riding The Waves of Change, Change is Life: Poems of Personal Transformation in the Work Place, and co-author on Can The Human Being Thrive in The Work Place? Dialogue as a Strategy of Hope and The Partnership Council Field Book: Strategies and Tools to Co-Create a Healthy Work Place. She has also created a CD featuring Laurie reading her original poetry to music. It is called Alive With Passion which features musicians Susan Mazer and Dallas Smith.
Introduction: A Journey using dialogue in the work place.
Welcome to a journey into the next millennium. Welcome back to those who began the journey with either the first or second book in the "Wisdom From The Field Series: A Journey From Old to New Thinking" (Wesorick, 1995) or "A Journey From Old to New Relationships in the Work Setting", (Wesorick, 1996). This segment is about the use of dialogue as a strategy of hope for creating healthy work cultures. Dialogue connects people through respectful, open, honest communication around those things which matter most. It enhances continuous learning, expanded thinking, and respectful relationships through meaningful conversation. Dialogue is about the nature of conversations that seek to learn, to recognize, to welcome, and to honor the expressions of wisdom that come from each individual. It is a strategy of hope because it helps one learn to live as a human being in today's work culture-where daily the Soul meets the external world. For those just beginning this journey within the Wisdom From The Field Series, a repeat of some travel tips will be helpful: Please do not bring any baggage. We have found that it gets in the way, interferes with your desired pace, and prevents you from going to the most exciting places along the way. Stories will be shared throughout this series in order to capture the wisdom from the field. This wisdom will help guide us on this journey. It is shared to provoke your thinking and deepen your insights about relationships and dialogue. If you believe you see yourself or someone you know in a story, realize it may not be a story about any one individual. We will see ourselves and others because the stories are universal and represent reality across the practice field of life. The confidentiality of all individuals and practice settings is honored. The success of this journey rests with your thinking, your wisdom. Questions will be asked with that end in mind. That is also why the book is laid out with empty columns. These columns are placed for you to jot down your learning, thinking, questions, realizations, concerns, feelings and insights. We are not taking you on this journey; our intention is to partner with you. We will share our learning and assumptions as we travel, not for you to accept, but to help you examine, digest, and explore your thinking about dialogue and its impact on the quality of work cultures. You will be both comfortable and uncomfortable as you read. If you write in the margins "comfortable" or "uncomfortable" and what your thinking behind those feelings is, your personal wisdom will emerge. That is one of the goals of this book.
We believe this book will impact your life and the lives of everyone you touch. It will expand on Book I which explored the shift of thinking about the essence of our work, and on Book II which concentrated on the principles of healthy relationships. The information is based on the wisdom from the field gathered from thousands of colleagues who have collectively come together to create work cultures that nourish the human being.
If we care about the health of this society, we must care about the work cultures. The quality of a person's life is influenced by the quality of the work culture. Many adults spend more waking hours at work than at home. When people leave the work place, mothers and fathers come home to their children, and they bring the impact, the nature, and the outcomes of their work culture through the front door with them. The milieu, thinking, and relationships that unfold in the work setting influence the milieu, thinking, and relationships in every home, thereby impacting the quality of life for all of society.
