The Organization workshop (OW) – or "Laboratorio Organizacional" (LO) in both Portuguese and Spanish – is a CHAT-based learning event where participants master new organizational as well as social knowledge and skills through a learning-by-doing approach. It is aimed at large groups of unemployed and underemployed, a large number of whom sometimes may be persons with lower levels of education (LLEs). The OW addresses locally identified problems which can only be solved by collaborating groups. During a Workshop participants form a temporary enterprise which they themselves manage, an enterprise which contracts to do work at market rates. Once the workshop temporary enterprise is over, organizational, management and vocational skills gained can be used to form new businesses or social enterprises.
The creator of the OW is the Brazilian sociologist Clodomir Santos de Morais. The main elements of the workshop are a large group of people (stipulated originally by de Morais as "minimum 40, with no upper limit") the freedom to organize themselves within the law and all necessary resources in the hands of the group. de Morais' OW guidelines, originally distributed in mimeographed form, were (re)printed in several countries, languages and formats (including popular cartoon) over the years. The text was first translated into English by Ian Cherrett for use in anglophone Africa.
Field of study
de Morais' initial observation was that people, forced by circumstances and sharing one single resource base, learn to organize in a complex manner, involving a division of labor. During the seminal (1954 Recife, Brazil) event which he attended, a large group of activists had gathered in an ordinary town house, where "the cramped conditions of the house, combined with the need for secrecy so as not to arouse the suspicion of the police, ... imposed on the group a strict organizational discipline in terms of division and synchronization of all the tasks needed for such an event". The subsequent finding that little was learned about the event's supposed topic but instead, "an enormous lot about organization" became the inspiration and starting point for the design of what eventually was to become the organization workshop. Building on this, subsequent Moraisean practitioners corroborated de Morais' original finding that "organization" is not taught but "achieved" by a properly composed large group.
The OW field of study in the broadest sense is social psychology, the discipline that bridges the gap between psychology and sociology. Because the OW large group approach is Activity-based it stands out in a field notable for a long tradition of behaviorism-based "small group" approaches, such as group dynamics and T-group training.
"Activity-based" means that for people to learn, a real object has to be actually present; as Jacinta Correia puts it: "to learn how to ride a bike, you need a bike to ride on". Thus, for a large group to learn how to manage a complex enterprise, it has to have a complex enterprise to manage. In the OW context, this means that a group averaging 150, many of whom often with lower levels of education, are actively engaged, for an entire month, in (a) productive or service provision enterprise(s). For all the apparent, e.g., on-the-job training and action learning parallels, the OW's defining features are not only the need for a cooperative large group and the creation of (a) complex, real enterprise(s), but, principally, the position of the trainer and the way in which training messages are communicated. In OW-learning, the trainer's role is merely subsidiary (known as "scaffolding" in activity theory). In other words, it is not the trainer/instructor, but "the object that teaches".
In South America, its place of origin, this approach is known as the Método de Capacitación Masiva (MCM) or large-group capacitation method (LGCM).
