Two projects are most closely related to the themes of POS.

In the first project, a team of researchers (Hilary Bradbury, Benyamin Lichtenstein, Peter Senge, Katrin Kaeufer, and myself) conducted a six-year observational study of the Sustainability Consortium, a voluntary association among about a dozen large companies (e.g., BP, GM, Nike, Harley Davidson, Unilever) interested in sustainable business practices. The Consortium was organized by members of the Society for Organizational Learning, which spun off of MIT as a private non-profit membership organization. We were interested in the Consortium as a new kind of organizational form that may be well-suited to the sort of complex, ambiguous, unstructured, "wicked" problem that sustainability exemplifies. We history of the Consortium and its operational details revealed the importance of developing a "Relational Space" of trustful and peer-based interactions prior to organizing an "Action Space" of collective projects (or even collective goals beyond meeting and talking). This is in contrast to other studies of inter-organizational consortia that typically organize around shared goals and articulated contracts and rules.

The second project (with Michele Williams) focuses on a similar topic at a more micro level -- the importance of relational communication in nursing change of shift reports. Working with a major hospital, we have observed shift reports, taperecorded, used self-report questionnaires, etc. with the goal of documenting the importance of relational as well as technical communication. Technical communication is the factual information needed to provide patient care; relational communication is the manner in which communication takes place, including everything that establishes trustful and open relationships that facilitate inquiry and learning. We believe that good relational communication is important for patient care and development of nursing competence.