Adriano Pianesi is an online and off-site facilitator, an educator and an expert in helping people, teams, and organizations develop actionable competencies for leadership, team work, and change through dialogue and technology. His distinctive work focuses on improving the quality of collaboration – online and face-to-face - as people engage difficult, complex, adaptive challenges. His formal education in Group Dynamics (University of Rome, Italy) and Organizational Communication (University of Milan, Italy), combined with his extensive consulting experience with a broad range of clients and contexts over the last 20 years, results in a unique and powerful approach to helping people build community in circumstances where they're inclined to pull apart by leveraging the power of dialogue and of online tools.

Prior of his current work, Adriano was Lead Training Consultant at Serco North America, where he provided business training services in support of a large scale Oracle CRM implementation. He directed training operations for 800+ users in numerous locations across the country. Drawing from this experience and from other work in communications, he began experimenting with the use of alternative methods of building learning communities during IT systems implementation projects and other change management initiatives. Its focus on the power of conversation, experience and hosting in adult learning, became the foundation of The Learning Construction Site, his signature training methodology (see http://bit.ly/tY6Zp3) and of The Art of Online Hosting, his powerful approach to online meetings/ seminars (see http://bit.ly/h7zDvO ).

His clients include: NASA, The International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Marine Corps, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the YMCA of Greater Omaha. Adriano is a member of the E-learning Guild and of the Society of Organizational Learning, a regular contributor to The Systems Thinker and serves as an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, MBA program.

Program Description:

As organization development professionals, we are committed to providing high quality interactive learning experiences that enable our clients to overcome their challenges and meet their goals. In today’s environment with slashed budgets and geographically dispersed organizations, we realize the potential that webinars can provide for online meetings/seminars. Unfortunately, the potential to connect people and information in these forums often ends up being a muted and boring Power Point slide show. It is no wonder that participants often decide to multitask on something else since they aren’t truly engaged. There is another way, to provide a real online conversation that empowers people to interact and connect with each other. Our presenter is a noted thought leader in this field and will provide us with some valuable tips on how develop a truly collaborative webinar experience that leverages the power of online communication through engaging conversation on questions that matter.

SIG Leader: