Chicago OD Practitioners Network
Topic: Inoculating Your Organization Against the Mind-Heart Disconnection Virus
Date: Friday, May 30, 2025
Location: Virtual, via Zoom
Time: [7:45-8:00] AM, CDT- networking
[ 8:00-9:30] AM, CDT- program
Register: Send an email to CODPNetwork@gmail.com by Tues, May 27 (free program). You will receive a Zoom link during the week of the program.
Program Description:
A previously unrecognized cognitive virus is spreading through organizations. This virus disrupts the link between mind and heart, diminishing employees’ ability to think rationally and empathize compassionately.
When this virus takes hold, it impairs decision-making, psychological safety, conflict resolution, and accountability. Employees become reactive, avoidant, emotionally distant, and less effective at navigating complex interpersonal dynamics. The impact on leadership effectiveness is particularly profound.
In this 75-minute presentation, you’ll learn how to spot areas of your organization where this virus is undermining employee performance and how to eradicate it.
Agenda
- Pair Exercise: Share a current leadership/interpersonal challenge you are facing.
- Individual Reflection: Write down the negative emotions you are experiencing relative to your challenge and why you're feeling this way.
- Lecture: The Mind-Heart Disconnection Virus - What it is; How to tell if someone is infected; How it hijacks metacognition, suppresses empathy, and stifles development.
- Training: Learn a technique to disarm the virus.
- Individual Exercise: Apply this technique to your leadership/interpersonal challenge.
- Case Study: Describe an ongoing initiative to eradicate the virus from an 800-person organization.
- Pair Exercise: What are you taking away from today that you can apply to a situation you’re in now?
- Share top takeaways & closing
Learning Objectives
Participants will be able to:
- Recognize the effects of the Mind-Heart Disconnection Virus in self and others.
- Explain how this virus hijacks metacognition, suppresses empathy, and stifles development.
- Disarm the virus when they notice it in themselves.
- Identify areas within their [client’s] organization where eliminating this virus would deliver a high return on investment.
About the Program Facilitator Charles Jones.
Charles M. Jones is a behavioral scientist at the Institute for Adaptive Mastery. The author of “Emotional Intelligence for Stress-free Leadership” and a chapter of Fielding University’s “Innovations in Leadership Coaching,” Charles’s groundbreaking discoveries regarding the causal relationships between emotions, needs, stress, reactivity, negativity, and trauma are revolutionizing our approach to raising emotional intelligence, eliminating workplace negativity, and developing empathetic leaders. Past clients include American Airlines, Capital One, Direct TV, IBM, JP Morgan Chase, Motorola, Nokia-Siemens, Pfizer Consumer Healthcare, Lockheed Martin, Portland Community College, Sterling-Winthrop Pharmaceuticals, and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. An avid hiker and jam band aficionado, Charles lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife and golden doodle.
