Appreciative Inquiry

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How Appreciative Inquiry Supports Diversity, Equality and Inclusion

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How Appreciative Inquiry Supports Diversity, Equality and Inclusion

The words are easy: we want to create a diverse and inclusive culture, that promotes equality of access and opportunity. The business case for creating a work environment that is inclusive of difference, that honours and makes good use of diversity, and that manages itself in such a way that all employees feel they are fairly treated, has long been made. The challenge is how to achieve such an environment. I want to briefly consider how using Appreciative Inquiry can support the development of such a culture.

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How can we bring the benefits of Appreciative Inquiry to stuck change projects?

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How can we bring the benefits of Appreciative Inquiry to stuck change projects?

There are various signs that a change project has got stuck. One is that the senior managers are working all hours while everyone else is sort of waiting, not knowing what to do. Another is frustrated change agents pointing to the plans and diagrams all over their office walls while talking about their problems of ‘resistance to change’ and ‘lack of buy-in’. Yet another is a workforce that is demoralised, demotivated and rapidly losing hope of any improvement any time soon.

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Boosting your resilience and adaptability

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Lockdown is easing, but that doesn’t mean we are going back to normal. We need to think instead of ourselves as moving forward in to a new normal. This new normal involves living with the reality of coronavirus: a winter surge is predicted by many experts. Navigating this new normal will take resilience and adaptability.

What helps us be more resilient and adaptable?

Resilience can be defined as having the resources, mental, physical or experience-based, to cope with unexpected, difficult or adverse situations.

Being adaptable means being able to flex our expectations and behaviour when circumstances change.

For both resilience and adaptability, being resourceful is key.

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Using Lego in Appreciative Inquiry

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I recently posted some pictures on Twitter and Linkedin of a leadership development session I ran with a colleague where we used Lego to conduct an Appreciative Inquiry. This stimulated some interest and requests for more information on what we did, so I thought I would explain in a little more detail.

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Why coaching isn’t as easy as people think, and something to help

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And so it has come to past that from time to time I find my self teaching groups ‘coaching skills’. Sometimes this is groups of managers, sometimes fledging professional coaches, and sometimes people with post-graduate coaching degrees or similarly impressive credentials. And yet, for all these groups, one of the hardest challenges seems to be developing the skill of asking questions rather than more tempting options like: offering solutions, giving advice, sympathising, sharing their own experience, or in some other way failing to inquire.

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A Client’s write up of an Appreciative Inquiry Event

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This account of a recent one-day Appreciative Inquiry Event by Alan Brunstrom of ECSAT. He wrote it for their internal use and copied me in. I thought it gave a very good sense of the client experience and asked if I might share it on my website.

I hope you find it useful in creating a sense of how these events come about, how they are experienced, and what they can produce.

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What kind of conversation are you having today?

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In many workplaces conversation is regarded as an adjunct to the real work of getting stuff done. All too often a request for a conversation is experienced as an interruption, a distraction from real work. Seen as a necessary evil, the objective is to complete the conversation as quickly as possible so all involved can get back to work. While the topic of conversation may be regarded as important, the quality of conversation doesn’t even register. This is very unfortunate as the quality of any conversation will have an impact beyond the moment. 

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Where Next With Positive Psychology

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Where Next With Positive Psychology

Earlier this month I attended the Global Strengthscope Practitioner Conference in London. A wonderful and inspiring conference where completely unexpectedly I was presented with the 2017 conference ‘Outstanding Contribution to Positive Work Practices Award.’ I was delighted and honoured and it got me thinking about what we have achieved so far in bringing positive work practices into the workplace and what we have yet to achieve,

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Energy state transformation is the key to Appreciative Inquiry effectiveness

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I have recently come across a great paper about human energy, it is referenced at the end of this piece. It set me thinking about what it was saying in relation to Appreciative Inquiry. These are my thoughts.

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Key factors that create living human system learning and change

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Introduction

In the last twenty years a new understanding of organizations has been developed, understanding them as living human systems of enterprise and creativity. It offers as an alternative to the dominant view of organizations as large and complicated machines of production. Methodologies based on this understanding, for instance Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, World Café and SimuReal, allow the whole of the organizational domain to be approached from the living human system perspective. They allow us to address all organizational challenges from recruitment to redundancy within the same living human system frame. Four key factors underpin this approach.

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Free excerpt from my new book 'Positive Psychology And Chnage': Features Of Co-Created Change

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Co-created change differs in its process and effects from imposed change. Whole-system change methodologies such as Appreciative Inquiry and World Café facilitate co-created change.

This is an edited extract from my new book Positive Psychology and Change

 

Co-created change...

1. Calls on the organization’s collective intelligence

Participative co-creation involves, from the very beginning, those affected by the change, allowing them to apply their ‘local knowledge’ intelligence at the point at which it can save the organisation both time and money.

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Eight High-Value Ways To Access Our Expertise

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1. Use Our Learning and Development Activity Support Card Packs

Over the past year we have assembled a range of card packs to support development activities from coaching to strategy development. In particular we have our own Positive Organisational Development Cards that condense the wisdom of positive psychology into questions and action suggestions across twenty themes, from leadership to positive emotions. We also have a selection of Strengths Cards suitable for groups across the organisation. And we have a range of other cards to enable work with Values, Behaviour, Expertise and Emotional Intelligence. While many have free downloadable pdf guides, all are highly versatile, easily portable and great value!

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The Distinctive Nature of Co-creative Change

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How is it different, why is it better?

Co-creative approaches to organization change such as Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, and World Café have some very distinctive features that differentiate them from more familiar top-down planned approaches to change.

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Working with the need for convergence in a divergent conversation

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Appreciative Inquiry and other co-creative methodologies are essentially divergent ways of working together; the emphasis is on the value of diversity and variety. Such ways of working can trigger a pressure to converge on a few key points very early in the process, indeed sometimes before the event has even begun. This pressure can be the expression of various different needs, for example:

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Seven Helpful Things To Know About Achieving Change In Organizations

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The plan is not the change

All too often those involved in creating the plan for change believe this to be the most essential part of the process, worthy of extended time and effort, while implementation is seen as ‘just’ a matter of communicating and rolling out the plan. Plans are a story of hope. Change happens when people change their habitual patterns of communication and intervention in a meaningful and sustainable way.

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Bite - Sized Positive Psychology: The success round

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Much research has now confirmed happiness has many benefits. One easy way to use positive psychology to bring these benefits into the work place is by opening a meeting with a ‘success round’. All too often in meetings we plunge straight into the business of the day. Starting the meeting by giving people a chance to share a recent success not only boost people’s mood in the moment, it also prepares them to engage more productively with what ever is to follow. As an added bonus,  we learn lots about what makes our colleagues tick.

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Leadership Gratitude Exercise

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I used this recently with a group of managers as part of a workshop on positive and appreciative leadership. It is an effective way into the virtuous practices aspect of flourishing organizations and into the topic of authentic leadership. It could just as well be used as an exercise in individual executive coaching or development

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When A Divergent Discussion Must Produce A Convergent Conclusion

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A number of Appreciative Inquiry practitioners were having a conversation concerning the strong demand frequently experienced from commissioners and contractors for a highly convergent end to a discursive, divergent event.

We asked ourselves two questions: What was this request an expression of? and How could we meet it without compromising the spirit of our endeavours? Here are the high points of our discussion.

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Why We Should Cultivate Gratitude In Our Leaders – Particularly In Difficult Times

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One might have thought that the expression of gratitude was for the benefit of the recipient, to feel acknowledged and affirmed in their generous act: possibly so. However the experience of gratitude also brings great benefit to the donor, and some of those benefits can be seen to act as an inoculation against the dangerous seductions of privilege, power and position.

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‘Houston, we have a problem’ – What Does It Mean To Have A Problem?

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At the 2012 World Appreciative Inquiry conference I fell into conversation with Stefan Cantore. Stefan was busy thinking about ‘our love affair with problems’ in preparation for writing a chapter for a forthcoming publication (details at end). We had a great discussion about this that stayed with me and caused me further thought.

 

How do we know when we encounter a problem?