The document summarizes an interview between Joe Dager and Sarah Lewis about positive change and appreciative inquiry. Some key points:
- Sarah is the director of Appreciating Change consultancy and author of books on appreciative inquiry and positive psychology.
- Positive psychology research shows focusing on strengths and what's working leads to more sustainable organizational change than examining problems.
- Appreciative inquiry uses large group participation to understand strengths and co-create a shared vision and plans for change, increasing ownership.
- SOAR framework is an alternative to SWOT analysis that focuses discussion on strengths, opportunities, aspirations and results in a positive way.
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Mastering Positive Change
Guest was Sara Lewis
Related Podcast:
Mastering Positive Change
Mastering Positive Change
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Sarah Lewis is the Managing Director of
Appreciating Change, a psychological
change consultancy focused on helping
leaders and managers achieve positive
change in their organizations. Appreciating
Change specializes in using rapid response
change methodologies. With over 25 years’
experience of helping individuals and
organizations change, she regularly
presents at National Conferences and
publishes in magazines.
Appreciating Change is a business psychology consultancy
specializing in helping organizations to achieve sustainable
change. Working closely with the client to ensure partnership and
ownership, we bring expertise in psychology and in social change
methodologies such as Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space and
World Café. All of these approaches help reduce resistance to
change and the need to create ‘buy-in’, rather people co-create
the change of which they will be part. Recent clients include:
Aston Business School, Kronos, DeBeers, Vectoraerospace and
Buckingham County Council.
This year we have begun offering a series of Masterclass
workshops to give people the chance to learn directly from
Sarah's experience in the field of Positive Psychology and
particularly the use of Appreciative Inquiry in the workplace.
These run every 3 months and alternate between a Masterclass
aimed at fellow practitioners, which is tailored to those who have
some experience and understanding of the theory behind
organizational change already, and a Masterclass aimed at
leaders in organizations which is more aimed at helping them use
this learning in their management of the organization.
Mastering Positive Change
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Joe Dager: Welcome, everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of
"Business901" podcast. With me today is Sarah Lewis. She's the
managing director of Appreciating Change, a psychological
change consultancy focused on helping leaders and managers
achieve positive change in their organizations. Her most recent
book is "Positive Psychology at Work," and the work that I am
most familiar with is the book "Appreciative Inquiry for Change
Management." Sarah, I would like to welcome you. I have to add
"AI for Change Management" in such a short time has become
one of my most referenced books. Could you give me a short
introduction to the book and yourself?
Sarah Lewis: I'd be delighted to. Thank you, Joe. The book is a
distillation really of 10 or more years of working with appreciative
inquiry and training people to use this approach, realizing that
there were certain things that people asked time and time again
and were interested in understanding more about. I thought it
would be a good idea to try to put it all down in writing to make it
accessible to people. I was very lucky to be helped by my
colleagues Jonathan and Stefan who coauthored the book with
me.
For myself, I've been working in an appreciative way based on
appreciative inquiry approaches from about 1993, when I was
introduced to this way of working through an institute here. It
has just transformed my practice and also actually my experience
of the world. It's a very powerful approach I find.
Joe: Well, what prompted your new book, "Positive Psychology
at Work"? Does it cover a broader spectrum of AI or does it zero
down into it?
Sarah: They're two separate strands. Appreciative inquiry, as
you will know from your reading, was developed by David
Cooperrider in the States, from Case Western University through
his work there. Recently, separately and in the psychology world,
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Martin Seligman, 10 or 12 years ago now, started becoming
interested in what's the difference between naught and plus five,
as it were, in human flourishing, human wellbeing, happiness,
lives well lived. What's the difference between being OK and
really thriving?
Psychology has spent a lot of time looking at the difference
between minus five and zero, so examining mental ill health,
failure to thrive, unhappy people and different times. We've
learned a lot about how to get people back to a good enough
point. But Martin Seligman started becoming interested in what
makes people exceptional and can we learn from that?
So it seemed to me that there was a real match between these
two approaches and that almost appreciative inquiry was the
organizational arm of positive psychology. I wanted to explore
what happens if you bring these two approaches together.
What does it mean for leaders and managers in organizations?
How can they benefit from this exciting research in this area of
positive psychology in a practical and pragmatic way, so that they
can make a difference in their own organizations?
Joe: Why is positive psychology important to an organization?
Sarah: Essentially, organizations spend a lot of time focusing on
what goes wrong in an attempt to prevent it from happening
again. Very reasonable, clearly we need to learn from mistakes
and failures and find out how to prevent them reoccurring. The
issue is that if you study mistakes, failures and things that aren't
working, what you learn about is them. What you don't
necessarily learn about is what makes success.
One of the things we're realizing is that if you study your
organization from a perspective of when are people working at
their best, what are the most successful things that we're doing?
When do people feel really great here? What engages people
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about their work? What do people find motivating, what are the
values that hold us together? These kinds of things you learn
about the factors for success.
Interestingly, some of the research that's been done, again, by
an American academic Ken Cameron, who has studied the best of
the organizations. Those that are very productive, very profitable
and great places to work he calls flourishing organizations.
It's clear that they do thing qualitatively differently to other
organizations. It's not just more of the same. They do things
differently.
Joe: In doing things differently, I'm going to assume from the
conversation, is taking more of a positive approach, right?
Sarah: Well, there are three key elements. One definitely is this
positive approach. We call that an affirmative bias. Within the
organization they're always looking to affirm the best of what
they do, to affirm that the strengths, skills and abilities that their
people bring, to look to the best of what they're able to do and
build on that. Also, they have a tendency to be interested in the
exceptionally good, like the positive deviance in the organization.
So rather than just ignoring when someone does better than
everyone else as some strange anomaly -- "Well, that's just
so-and-so or that's just so-and-so's team, they just got
lucky," -- they're much more interested to find out what
happened.
"Well, what is she doing in her department that's allowing her to
get these particularly good results? Can we learn from the best of
our range of activities?"
So they put in much energy into that as they do to examining
where things might be not quite up to scratch. And then the third
thing and this is very interesting I think, and very much relates to
some other research in positive psychology about emotions.
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So something else they found out about the most flourishing
organizations is that they demonstrate a lot of what you might
call "the virtues." Like compassion, and forgiveness, and interest,
and support, and humility. And just words that aren't always
associated with organizational life.
Joe: I find that quite interesting, because it really is a deeper
dive from Appreciative Inquiry.
Sarah: Yes, absolutely. Appreciative Inquiry, one of the main
principles that it's built on is this principle of positivity, which
essentially says that, "change takes energy." And energy that
comes from positive emotions is much more sustainable as a
support for change than the energy that comes from what you
might call negative emotions. Particularly fear is often used in
organizations to try to promote change. Fear, anger those sorts
of emotions are important. They produce a short burst of energy
to change something. Whereas things like hope, optimism,
passion, excitement, joy, or interest, these emotions, these
positive emotions, create a much more sustainable movement
forward for change.
So Appreciative Inquiry has always recognized this importance of
positive emotions to help organizations, and as part of
organizational life, particularly around change. And the more
research that is done into positive emotions through the positive
psychology field, the more apparent it becomes what an asset
that are, both to us in our own lives, and to organizations.
The huge difference it makes. You may have come across Shawn
Achor's work. He's done some fantastic broadcasts on TED and so
on, who's really coined it. And said, "You know what we're
realizing now? Is that happiness causes success. Not success
causes happiness. That when we're able to develop more positive
emotional states for ourselves as individuals and in our
organizations, then we do better." That is very exciting I think.
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Joe: Well I think it is. But to frame that and to look at it from
another context, I grew up in world of fixing problems. I went out
and looked for problems to fix. Boy, that's a change for me. I'm
thinking as I observe something, when I'm listening to someone
talking, and I'm looking for problems. I'm looking how I can help
someone. What you're saying, I shouldn't be looking for the
problems. I should be helping someone expand on the positives.
But it's easy to say it. It's difficult to do, I think.
Sarah: It's interesting. You're absolutely right. No one's saying
it's an either/or kind of situation. We still need to continue to
solve problems, and we solve problems extremely well. As
organisms, and biological organisms, human beings are very
good problem solvers. It stands us in good stead. But sometimes
we try to apply that skill where it doesn't produce the goods,
particularly in social situations. So working with teams, perhaps
people who have fallen into conflict. That kind of thing. Problem
solving that doesn't always move us forward. So there are two
elements that I want to sort of highlight here.
One is that I think David Cooperrider came up with a fantastic
expression when he said in one of his writings that, "Every
problem is the expression of a frustrated dream. If we didn't have
a sense of how things could be, we wouldn't know that anything
was wrong." Which I think is a brilliant insight.
Clearly, when we're talking about a problem, we're actually also
expressing our sense that things could or should be different. Part
of what Appreciative Inquiry does is it says, "Well, if talking about
this, whatever it is, as a problem, isn't solving it, isn't moving it
forward, why don't we talk about the other end of that equation.
Start imagining how things could be if we build upon the best of
what we do have.
"If we focused on what is working around this problem area. Built
more that and grew more of that. How might the world be? That
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has a very liberating and shifting effect for a group of people in
various ways."
The other point that you raised I think is very important, is about
how we do train our brains. And evolutionary speaking, it's
important for us to spot danger, problems, things that aren't
working. So we're very oriented towards doing that.
Our work life encourages us to do that even more. Particularly
people, quality inspectors, accountants, people like this, whose
whole life is made up of trying to spot what's going wrong. That
part of their brain becomes very well developed.
What we don't necessarily spend so much time is developing the
appreciative abilities. So our critical abilities tend to be very well
developed by the time we're sort of in adulthood. But our
appreciative abilities, our appreciative eyes, and ears, and
judgment, and intelligence, tend to be underdeveloped.
Therefore, for a lot of people, it does feel very odd. These parts of
their brain are not as well developed. They're not as skilled at
doing this.
Joe: You talk about fast and efficient when you talk about
positive change and appreciative inquiry. What makes it fast and
efficient?
Sarah: That's a very good question. To understand that we have
to contrast it with the dominant model of change, this is the idea
that change is a huge plan. In most people's minds when they're
thinking about organization or change it's about a small group get
together, they decide what the strategy is, they maybe gather
some data as well, and they pull together a plan or perhaps
create a vision, that kind of thing, and then they go out to the
rest of the organization and try to sell their vision of the future
and their understanding of the best way to get there to
everybody else in the organization. That takes a huge amount of
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time because they're pushing their ideas into the rest of the
organization and you'll be familiar with the expression we've got
to get buy-in. Obviously if they're trying to get someone to buy
that must mean they're selling. The other one is we're going to
meet resistance here. People don't like change, we're going to
meet resistance. You hear all that. That's our default normal way
of dealing with change.
What appreciative inquiry and the other transformational,
collaborative approaches to change do is turn all of that on its
head and they say let's start with the large group, let's start with
everyone who's going to be part of this change one way or
another, everyone who's going to be affected by this as best we
can. The whole system, but you can't always get quite the whole
system.
As best we can the whole system that's part of whatever it is
we're talking about and let's together first of all understand what
we've got to build on, which is the discovery part of the
appreciative inquiry process, and then imagine using that,
building on that, how we want our organization to be, which is
the dream part of the AI process. Then realize how we've got to
be now to move in that direction, which is the design part.
Then the delivering part is what are we going to go away after
our congress together today and do to make this happen. What
you get is a lot of people co-creating both an understanding of
the situation and also some ideas for what the future could hold
and some shared clarity, some shared common ground about
how things need to be different now to help move towards a good
future.
People are getting by overcoming resistance and all of that
because people's voices have been present in the process of
creation so they own it. It's the secret of participation, really,
done in a particular way. Because of the way appreciative inquiry
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works, very much creating positive emotion and a positive pull
towards the future, people are motivated to go away and do
things to make these futures happen.
In that sense it's very fast and it's very effective.
Joe: Could you touch upon the SOAR framework instead of using
the SWOT analysis. That's a positive approach of looking at the
present situation.
Sarah: SOAR was developed by Jackie Stavros and others as a
way to apply appreciative inquiry to the strategic challenge.
Generally speaking, in appreciative inquiry we don't go
investigating, for instance in this context, threats and weaknesses
because the more we talk about them the bigger they get in our
minds, as it were, and if we can't do anything about them it just
depresses everybody. If we work on what are our strengths, what
are the opportunities, what aspirations do we have for the
organization, building on those, and how do we know if we're
making progress, i.e. results, people are able to stay in a much
more positive frame. Remembering always that as we said before
it's not that we're ignoring difficult things it's that we're talking
about them differently and therefore are allowing different things
to happen.
I've used SOAR with a few different organizations and it works
really well. If there's an issue that has to come up of course it will
come up and then we work within the context of that
conversation to try and reframe that in a way that is going to
help us do something with it, to reframe it in a positive way.
Which is a bit about what you were saying when you were
listening in your meetings developing that ability to think where is
the positive in all of this?
What can I ask that will allow people to see that there is
something good here? For instance, if someone's talking about a
weakness or a threat it might be what do we have that's going to
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help us with that? What do we have that might ameliorate that?
If we thought about this as an opportunity rather than a
weakness how would we be acting differently?
It's just something about moving away from the standard
conversation where you run into these buffers of depressing
conversation.
Joe: We talk especially in Lean terms you always hear the five
whys. Why, why, why and stuff. Is there an alternative in positive
psychology to the five whys?
Sarah: Again I would say there's nothing wrong with the five
whys if you're in a rational, analytical, logical problem-solving
place and you get to a root cause. If you're dealing with an
engineering problem, that may be very appropriate. The
challenge arises when people try to take that way of thinking into
something like a social situation, because people are, as we
know, very emotional and creative entities. We're not just
rational, logical thinkers. We also have an emotional life, an
imaginative life, an interior life, a social life, all sorts of things.
We are very capable of cutting off our noses to spite our face,
putting our emotions before our logical and rational analysis.
When it's all very emotion-free, and it's nothing to do with
relationships particularly and it's a mechanical problem, then I
think the five Y's probably works extremely well.
It's when you take that and try and apply that to something like a
team not functioning terribly well or a relationship not functioning
terribly well, or low morale in an organization, it just doesn't tend
to produce useful answers.
Joe: I have to mention that Derek Lusk was talking to me about
AI on Twitter. Appreciative inquiry is his dissertation topic that
he's working on. I asked him what question he would have of
you. He said that appreciative inquiry seeks to change norms,
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values, policies, ideals. He wanted to know how AI is affected by
an increasingly diverse employee population; if that's changing
the way we use AI.
Sarah: It's interesting. First of all, I think appreciative inquiry is
incredibly scalable. So he's absolutely right. In the broadest
terms when you want to use it at an organizational level, those
are very much the cultural things that you're trying to change.
You can also use it at a team level and you can use it in coaching.
But to go back to your key question, the diversity of the
workforce is absolutely what appreciative inquiry thrives on.
Appreciative inquiry regards the organization as a social
constructed phenomenon, i.e. it is constructed by the people in
the organization.
The patterns of relationship, conversation and interaction that
people exhibit in the organization are really what make it an
organization, our patterns of relationships. I sometimes say that
we talk our organization into existence every day by the way we
behave with each other.
We're looking for how to better help the organization best
respond to the changes in the environment, to spot the
opportunities that are coming up for the organization to grow, to
respond to changes in the organization that might threaten its
survival and so on. The more diversity we have in terms of
different people's understandings of the world, perceptions of the
world, experiences of the world, conceptions of the future and so
on, the more possibility, the more resource we have within the
system for it to find a useful way forward.
So diversity is actually a real asset for appreciative enquiry and
what we have to do with that of course is create sufficient
commonality amongst the people who are part of the system that
they are able to move forward together. And commonality is not
the same as consensus.
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People don't have to have exactly the same views and opinions
and share exactly the same things. There has to be sufficient
commonality, as I sometimes say, to allow for conjoint action,
i.e., action that is reasonably coordinated with other people.
Again this can stand in contrast to other ways of working with
organizations that look to eliminate diversity and wants
consensus and there is one true path, there is only way to think
about, talk about, act within our organization. They do run into
more difficulties when they need to adapt because it's hard for
people who have alternatives to find a voice in those
organizations.
When we work with appreciative enquiry we are interested in all
voices because we don't know where possibilities that may help
the organization find a good use for productive way forward. We
don't know where those possibilities might lie.
Joe: I think what appreciative enquiry lends itself to is more of
that designer type look. It looks at a more a holistic solution,
looking at the system as a whole and that you don't necessarily
just draw out different solutions, you keep them and you evolve
to a solution, rather than pick a solution and lead with it. Is that
fair to say that?
Sarah: Oh, absolutely, because it's all about this kind of
co-creation. So people are coming together to co-create ways
forward and the resources that are used with appreciative enquiry
are to do with imagination and possibility and past experience
and the diversity of skills and knowledge that people in the
organization have. So you want to get a good range of
possibilities so you can start finding good solutions and good
ways forward.
Joe: In your experience, what are the main problems leaders
run into when trying to achieve change like this?
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Sarah: That's a very good question, because leaders do have to
understand their organization, their role in the organization and
change differently to get the best out of these approaches. So
first of all they have to understand that the organization is a
living social system and that they can't control it in that sense. Its
self-organizing, it's made up of individuals who are essentially
free agents that may be on the payroll etc, etc. So the illusion
that the leader controls the organization is one thing they have to
give up. Another one they have to give up is the idea that they
know everything, that they actually understand the organization
better than anybody else because they are at the top of the
structure. That's not necessarily the case either. That's an illusion
that they need to give up to be able to give suitable credence to
other people's account of how the organization is.
So there are lots of things about understanding an organization
differently. The leader in an appreciative enquiry kind of approach
is one amongst many in a privileged position. So they are one
voice amongst many, they are able to set some of the context.
They have particular privileges so they can say we have limited
budget for whatever we come up with, or it needs to be in these
kinds of broad parameters.
But what they are doing is they are, in an appreciative way, is
they are calling on the collective intelligence of the organization.
This is where it starts to become hugely liberating for leaders.
There is two things, one is they don't have to work it out all
themselves. There are however many brains that are in the
organization who can apply themselves to the challenge with as
much information as each of them have.
Joe: Well, you lead to a very good point. I forget which book I
was listening to, the person said is that you are not the smartest
person in the room; the room is the smartest person.
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Sarah: Well, obviously they said that. In much fewer words,
that's pretty much the point I was trying to make. So for the
leader, they don't have to solve it all, and they don't have to have
all the answers. That's the same thing really. But the main thing
is they don't have to have the answer. What they have to have
faith in is the fact that the smart room, the room as a whole, the
system will find a way forward, if given the right conditions.
Joe: One of the things I used in a recent workshop that I got for
your book, AI for Change Management, was using reflecting
teams. Could you describe that a little bit to me and expand on it
a little?
Sarah: There is different ways of using reflecting teams. What it
does is it puts the team that's in the reflecting space into what I
would call listening position. Often this is done in what they call a
goldfish bowl process. Some people will be in a group talking and
other people will be around them listening. You might have the
senior team who are discussing their understanding of the
situation, the broader situation that the organization is
responding to, and some of their initial thoughts at the moment
about how the organization might act. They might have a
selection of people from around the organization who are
listening. The people outside don't have to respond to anything
that they hear the senior managers say, they are just there to
listen. After a while you would ask the audience, what has been
the audience to get into small groups and give them some
questions to consider, what did they found most helpful about,
what their board have got to say, and what have they noticed
about what they are attending to, what other things do they think
are important for the board to attend to in its decisions and, I
don't know, whatever, some questions.
Then the board members can either be situated each in a group,
or just wander around from one group to another. But again they
are not there to have to answer to anything that they hear. When
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people are put in a position where they don't have to respond to
what's being said, they hear so much more because they don't
have to have a defense, have an answer, have a comeback, have
a rationale to bring to something that somebody has said.
They can just let it sort of sink in a bit more and hear things that
they don't hear when they are in that normal conversational
space.
Joe: I think that's the interesting part that I found out about it is
that how much more you hear when you are not sitting there
trying to determine your response.
Sarah: Absolutely. The hearing sinks in deeper, because you can
hear it. It has more impact. Something that somebody would
have rejected out of hand if they had had to defend it, they are
able to allow it enough room to have influence.
Joe: In your book, you discuss Open Space and World Cafe.
Could you just briefly describe the two methods.
Sarah: Yes. I'll start with Open Space, which is again a very
powerful methodology that I use more and more with groups
where I can. Essentially it's a way of allowing a group to set their
own agenda around a topic for what are the important things that
need to be spoken about, discussed in some way and then just
trying to structure for doing that. So very broadly it would need
to be some business critical issue that needs discussion and
maybe decision making, and then you bring the system to that
issue that are relevant to it. And after some preliminaries you
essentially ask everybody who is there to put forward what they
think needs talking about, what the questions are, what they
wanted to discuss, what options they want to explore or
whatever. Then you can start the rest of the day from that.
So, you'd have a number of rooms, and you'd allocate a number
of discussions to each of the rooms. The person who's raised the
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topic is the host for that discussion. Then, people attend the
discussions that they're interested in.
This is just so powerful, compared to many day long meetings I
have been asked to facilitate, where basically, we have an agenda
and it starts at nine and it finishes at five and everyone has to
attend to every item, whether they're interested in it or not,
whether it's relevant to them or not.
When people are allowed to go where they are interested, and
where they are connected to the topic, they feel connected to the
topic, they just have, it's just, again, it's so much more faster and
more effective.
Joe: Before we go into World Cafe, can you use Open Space
internally within an organization? People could gather and have,
just a block of time that they could attend the meetings that they
felt important to them. I mean, that sounds like a facilitated thing
at a conference, or things like that, but can that really work
within an organization?
Sarah: I can't say I've heard of it. But I see no reason why it
shouldn't, why one shouldn't be able to develop an organization
that works much more on Open Space principles for its meetings
and discussions. I have to say, one of the great benefits of not
being part of a larger organization is I don't spend a lot of time in
meetings, except when we're there because people want to talk
about whatever it is I'm there for, if you see what I mean.
Joe: Sure, sure.
Sarah: So, I don't have to sit through those interminable
meetings, where I'm just waiting to get to my item. We know
that hours and hours of people's time can be wasted when they're
in meetings, not sure why they're there, not sure what they're
supposed to be contributing or taking away. But because
someone's told them they have to be there.
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Joe: Go on and explain the World Cafe a little bit.
Sarah: World Cafe, I think, is a methodology that's really good
for very exploratory conversations. Essentially, all of these are
ways of people having conversations in conversational group size,
simultaneously, so you can 20, 50, and 100 people, but only
working groups of six or 8. Then, have those conversations
connected. In World Cafe, people start at cafe tables. The idea is
that people talk to each other in a much more relaxed way when
they're in a more relaxed atmosphere. It was a bit of intent to
recreate a cafe atmosphere.
There's different ways you can do it. But essentially, let's just say
you have different questions on different tables around the key
topic, whatever that might be. And I start off at table A, and we
have a discussion there around the question on that table. And
then, one person stays at that table, after about 40 minutes or an
hour, and then, the rest of us move off to a different table to
address a different question.
You have the continuity around the particular question over two
or three rounds, maintained by the person who stays at the table.
But lots of connectivity as different people disperse to different
tables, if you can see this.
It's difficult to explain it just in the imagination, but different
people disbursed to different tables and join in the conversation
there. So the person that has remained from the previous round
will bring everybody up to speed on where we've got to, what's
been mentioned so far in relation in this question. Then just start
another discussion.
Again, it's a way of having lots of things happening
simultaneously and people being able to connect to two or three
different questions that interest them during the course of the
afternoon or the day.
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Joe: I think there were two that were very interesting concepts.
Have you continued to expand on them? Are you still using them,
those two concepts?
Sarah: Definitely I still use them. Increasingly for me, I
suppose, appreciative inquiry is the overarching approach,
methodology, philosophy or way of life, to be honest, for me now.
When I'm designing interventions for organizations to help them
move forward in whatever particular area it is, that's my
overarching frame. Within that, I may well bring in World Cafe
and Open Space as part of the process of appreciative inquiry.
I've also expanded it into manufacturing organizations
particularly. There's a process called SimuReal, which is again a
large system and much more similar to the lean type thing, but
again, socially organized.
It's a system where you bring the whole system into the room.
Then you simulate the process in the organization. With
manufacturing organizations particularly that tend to be very
geographically disbursed, so they're over big sites. Secondly,
people are very bound to their bit of the process.
Being away from your workbench is regarded with suspicion
because they want people on the line or on the bench. So people
don't understand what impact their action has further down the
line. It's known as the silo mentality. I'm sure you've heard the
expression.
If you're able to get the whole system in a room, then you can
run a simulation, over two or three months, of something like an
order going through the system. With people making the
decisions that they do in their own context, that looks sensible
and seem to solve a problem.
Someone might say, "Well, we haven't got quite the right number
of bits for this order that's coming through of ZY, but I know that
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AB will fit just as well as ZY. So let's take a couple of these ABs
and put them in the box, and I'll write it up afterward."
In no time at all, nobody knows where anything is, nothing is
where it is supposed to be. The computer is sending out
messages. The ERP system is sending out messages that no one
can fulfill. I find that works really well as well.
Anything where you get the whole system together so that they
can see what they're doing, it's just tremendously powerful.
Joe: It sounds very interesting. It sounds like a good thing for
me to do Monday at a meeting I'm going to.
Sarah: It takes a bit of setting up, I have to say.
Joe: How do you typically introduce AI or start an engagement
with someone?
Sarah: This, again, is one of the reasons why I wrote the book
because it's a question that gets asked so often. I guess there are
a couple of principles. One is you always have to start where your
organization is at. People rarely, although increasingly, rarely
come saying. "What we want is an appreciative inquiry
intervention," or, "What we want is strengths based way of
working." They usually come saying, "We've got this problem.
Can you help us?" that's your invitation to start having a
discussion about tell me how life will be when this problem is
solved or how things would be if you didn't have this problem or
what is it that you actually want more of? I can see you want less
of whatever the problem is. What would you like more of?
That's a way of starting to get to talk about it. You don't
necessarily have to say what we're doing is appreciative inquiry.
You just start working with them in an appreciative way. Then
how much of the software, as it were, that you explain to the
people you're working with depends on what feels appropriate.
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Some of the language is not easy for people if they've never
come across it before. Somebody very wise said, "If you want to
be able to work with people you have to be sufficiently similar not
to be frightening, but sufficiently different to be able to add
value." I think that's the balance you're always trying to find
when you're negotiating a new piece of work with someone.
If their whole language is around the organization as a machine
and problems and error and they've never heard the word
passion or excitement in an organizational context and you come
in talking about what gives life to the organization and positive
core and an appreciation you may be too alien for them to be
able to think that you can add any value.
You have to moderate how you join with the organization so that,
as I say, you seem sufficiently familiar and yet sufficiently
different. Does that help?
Joe: I think that was brilliant. When we go through these things
we always think that we're going to be the change agent, we
jump into it and everything. About 10 minutes into it you look at
all these glassy eyes looking at you. It's really starting with the
current state. Your journey of a mile starts with one step.
Sarah: They also already have a solution in mind. This is part of
the issue. They'll come to you saying, "Can you help us?" and
then they say, "What we're thinking we need is..." so you need to
start with that. I've found organizations say we're going to issue
a survey of something. OK, well tell me a bit about the survey. I
wonder if we can just add a couple more questions in there.
You're not dismissing what they've already done but you're
beginning to make it a little bit more appreciative. Wouldn't it be
good if we asked people a couple of questions about what they
enjoy about working here, what they think are working? Typically
the whole survey will be about what's wrong with the
organization.
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You've got lots of ways of just starting to bring the appreciative
parts in and then building on it from there.
Joe: You run a master class workshop every three months.
Could you tell me about it?
Sarah: Yes. We just started doing that this year so we ran the
first one specifically for external change agents, as it were;
Consultants, facilitators, trainers, that sort of thing. What I try to
do is for them to bring together some of the most recent research
and leaning in this area and we play around with how would you
introduce this into an organization through workshops yourself?
It's really training the trainers I suppose, up-skilling people who
do that sort of thing. Next week we'll be running a similar kind of
workshop but aimed directly at leaders and managers which will
be much more about how can you use this in your organizations?
Here are some of the key findings, some of the research, some of
the supporting evidence around the difference, some of the key
elements of this area.
Positivity, which we talked about; feeling good, good emotions,
understanding people's strengths, what distinguishes flourishing
organizations, and appreciative inquiry as a methodology for
bringing all of these things together in your organization. It'll be
much more oriented around how do you do this in little ways.
What can you do within your sphere of influence as the leader or
manager to start bringing some of these things into your work
area.
For some people that might be big, they might say I think I'm
going to go away and think about addressing this organizational
challenge from a more appreciative perspective. Someone else
might be a much smaller thing like we really could use running
our meetings slightly different. I run a team and we always start
with problems and maybe we should start with celebrating a few
successes that have happened since the last time we met and
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taking time out to notice where people are doing well and what's
going well.
Joe: If you had three pieces of advice for leaders for achieving
the fast, effective, sustainable change what would they be?
Sarah: I think one would be you don't have to do it all alone.
Draw on the collective intelligence of your organization. They
want to survive as much as you do, they want to help. There may
be some issues in the way they've been treated in the past but
it's as important to them as it is to you that this organization
continues to do well. One would be don't feel you have to do it all
alone. The second would be, humans have evolved in such a way
that they need more carrot than stick to be at their best. Because
we over-weigh negative things and under-weigh positive things,
we actually need three times as many good experiences as
negative experiences to start to enter the enchanted place of
creativity, connectivity, generativity, synchronicity and all the
good things that help organizations to move much faster and
much more efficiently.
Yes, you need to obviously keep a minimum line on things. But
what most organizations need a lot more of is the good stuff
pumped into them, so that positivity thing.
I think the third piece of advice, which is a much more generic
one, is it's becoming increasingly clear that the leaders who are
able to have the most positive impact in their organizations,
whatever their style may be, the key thing is this thing about
authentic leadership. Part of authentic leadership is being open
and transparent in -- that's the other thing -- a managed way.
I remember some of the London Business School people said that
after all their analysis, the art of leadership boiled downed to five
words, which was, "Be yourself more with skill." All of those
words are important, things like doing difficult things and asking
for forgiveness, being humble about the fact that this is not doing
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it on your own. Everybody here has contributed to what we've
achieved this year. Those old-fashioned in a way is being
grateful.
Everybody who comes to your organization helps to create it does
something that moves it forward. There's something about
allowing that side of yourself to come through to people, because
people do respond and emotions are very contagious, virtuous
circles.
If we see people being heroic, we're more inclined to be a little bit
more heroic ourselves the next time the opportunity arises. If
someone is helpful, we see someone being helpful or someone is
helpful to us, we're more likely to do it to somebody else.
You can set off these virtuous circles of very positive interactions,
which just have not escalating, but the virtuous circle gets bigger
and bigger benefits in terms of performance and productivity in
the end.
Joe: Is there something you would like to add about this topic
that I didn't ask?
Sarah: I hope what's come through is that I think we're at a
very exciting time, where we're beginning to really make a shift
from understanding the organization as something resembling a
machine, that people need to be coerced into being part of, to
understanding the organization as a social construction that
people need to be affirmed for being part of. And that what is
fantastic as far as I am concerned is, I think there is a lot of
ethics to do with working with organizations because you
interfere with people's lives and you need to I think, be very
careful about what you are doing and give it a good thought
about the impact, the interventions you are offering are going to
have on the quality of life of the people who are going to be
affected.
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What's really good news about these ways of working is that
introducing more positive emotion into organizations and more
positivity, helping them understand what people's strengths are
and how to work with them, helping them to appreciate what
people bring to the situation, not only is it good for organization
but it is good for individuals when we are able to experience
positive emotional states as opposed to negative emotional
states.
It affects our whole body in terms of our physiology and our brain
and it's just really good for us. And over the long term it affects
things like longevity. So we have this chance to do two good
things at once. If we work using some of these exciting bits of
research that are coming through from the pioneer academics
who are the ones who are doing the fascinating psychology
experiments that people do, them and their subjects, out of
which we get really useful knowledge that we can take into
workplace and start helping people and the organization be
better.
Joe: How could someone contact you?
Sarah: We have our own website,
www.appreciatingchange.co.uk. I have an email address, which is
sarahlewis@appreciatingchange.co.uk, and we have a UK phone
number, which is 0845 055 9874.
Joe: You will also be exhibiting at the CIPD annual conference in
Manchester this year. What are the dates for that?
Sarah: That is November 6th to 8th. And it is in the Central
Conference Hall. It's a great exhibition if you're an HR person.
People do come from abroad as well, so it's quite international
and they have, the exhibition is great, there is also a conference.
If anyone's got the funds for that as well, this is the highlight
conference in the UK for the HR community, that’s highly
recommended too.
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Joe: Well, hopefully my listeners of the podcast will stop by and
say they heard about it from the Business901 podcast.
Sarah: Well that would be wonderful, and thank you so much
Joe for creating the opportunity to share some of this good news
with people.
Joe: This podcast will be available at Business901 and
Business901 on the iTunes store, and I want to thank you again
very much, Sarah.
Sarah: Been a pleasure.
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Joseph T. Dager
Lean Marketing Systems
Ph: 260-438-0411 Fax: 260-818-2022
Email: jtdager@business901.com
Web/Blog: http://www.business901.com
Twitter: @business901
What others say: In the past 20 years, Joe and I
have collaborated on many difficult issues. Joe's
ability to combine his expertise with "out of the box"
thinking is unsurpassed. He has always delivered
quickly, cost effectively and with ingenuity. A brilliant
mind that is always a pleasure to work with." James R.
Joe Dager is President of Business901, a progressive company providing
direction in areas such as Lean Marketing, Product Marketing, Product
Launches and Re-Launches. As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt,
Business901 provides and implements marketing, project and performance
planning methodologies in small businesses. The simplicity of a single
flexible model will create clarity for your staff and as a result better
execution. My goal is to allow you spend your time on the need versus the
plan.
An example of how we may work: Business901 could start with a
consulting style utilizing an individual from your organization or a virtual
assistance that is well versed in our principles. We have capabilities to
plug virtually any marketing function into your process immediately. As
proficiencies develop, Business901 moves into a coach’s role supporting the
process as needed. The goal of implementing a system is that the processes
will become a habit and not an event.
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