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

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? While completing a personality profile questionnaire recently I noticed that I have a problem with the word problem. As the questionnaire asked me variations on how I deal with problems, I struggled to answer: the questions just didn’t connect. It would seem that I just don’t think in terms of problems and problem-solving: I don’t notice when I encounter them.

Trying to answer the questions I found it very hard to think of instances of recent problem-solving to help me. Did this mean I led a problem-free life? All became clear a few days later when I was working out how to fix something that had broken. I was going through a process in my mind of possible alternatives, seeking the resources and trying the solution out. Yes, you’ve guessed it, I was problem-solving only the word problem never entered my mind as a name for the activity I was involved in, and probably wouldn’t have occurred to me at all if not for my recent struggle with the questionnaire.

Problems and ‘Problems’

Talking to Stefan, and thinking about this, I wondered if we have problems and Problems. That is, things we sort out all the time, almost without noticing – ‘problems’ – and some other challenges that are similar but different – ‘Problems’. This led me to ask, what happens when we label something ‘Problem’. What is the purpose, impact and outcome of naming some particular thing a Problem. ‘Houston, we have a problem’ came to mind as one of the greatest examples of this act of labeling. What did it do? I suggest:

1. It called attention to something. In this case the world’s attention
2. It suggested this something was beyond the capacity of those so far involved
3. It extended the system around the situation
4. In this way it attracts resources to a situation
5. It caused creativity – the creativity of the Apollo community in this instance is the stuff of legend.
6. It acted to focus attention – I’m guessing many other activities at the Apollo base station were put on temporary hold!

So when someone in an organization calls ‘Problem’ we might argue that they are attempting to get focus, attention, resources and creativity applied to a situation to move it forward. They are also implicitly stating it is beyond the capacity of the existing system to move forward; that they need to connect to a bigger system. It’s an acceptable way of asking for help.

Problems from Heaven

David Cooperrider suggested that those who bring Problems are a gift, because they also bring a Dream. By labeling something a Problem and so asking for help the problem-bringer or namer is implicitly suggesting that there is still hope that things can be better, with the help of the wider system. So naming something a Problem also creates the possibility of hope.

So where does that leave us? I think we need a different word for the small stuff that we do everyday that gets caught up under the umbrella of ‘problem-solving’ making it look as if problems are everywhere.

I think Problem, used wisely, can act as a clarion call for resource and action. I think it needs to be recognized as a call for wider system involvement. The Apollo astronauts couldn’t resolve the situation developing on their spacecraft with their resources, they knew that and called the developing situation a Problem. The wider system responded. They responded emotionally and experimentally. They tried things out and then they tried other things out. They involved everyone with all their different skills to find a way forward that would allow the astronauts to live. People may have used their rational skills, but they were motivated by their emotional connection to the whole project and to the individuals in danger.

Problem gets a bad name in organizations because it is not recognized as a call for an emotional and relational response. Rather it is seem as a call for a rational analysis, devoid of emotional content.  Appreciative Inquiry as an approach is tailor made for helping organizations create a response to the clarion call of a Problem that is emotional and relational while utilizing all the rational abilities of the organization as appropriate. There is nothing wrong with calling Problem when the circumstances warrant it, only in our response.

Stefan contributed to the Handbook of the psychology of organizational development, leadership and change (Wiley-Blackwell) published in 2012

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more 'Thought Provoking' articles and more about Appreciative Inquiry in the  Knowledge Warehouse.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Does Happiness Contribute To Success? Reasons To Be Cheerful

While much research confirms that successful outcomes can foster happiness, it has tended to be seen as a one-way linear relationship: you have to be successful to be happy. But might it be more of a circular relationship? A virtuous circle where being happy makes it more likely you will succeed? In 2005 Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ed Diener and Laura King pulled together all the research they could find that addressed the question: does happiness contribute to success?

What does it mean to be happy?

Happy people are those who frequently experience positive emotions such as joy, interest and pride while they experience negative emotions such as sadness, anxiety and anger less frequently. It is this ratio of time spent in positive as opposed to negative moods that predicts those who define themselves as ‘happy people’. From other research we know that the ratio needs to be 3:1 or above to start to move us to describe ourselves as generally ‘happy’.

One suggestion is that happy people feel positive emotions more frequently because they are more sensitive to rewards in their environment. In other words, they find more reasons to be cheerful.

How might feeling happy help us succeed?

It seems that experiencing positive moods and emotions leads us to think, feel and act in ways that add to our resourcefulness and that helps us reach our goals. Positive emotions, it appears, are a signal to us that life is going well, that our goals are being met and our resources are adequate. Since all is going well, we feel we can spend time with friends, learn new skills, or relax and rebuild our energy reserves. We are also likely to seek out new goals, to plan a new project, or get started on booking that holiday for instance. We can compare this with when we are in a negative mood state, when our concern can become to protect our existing resources and to avoid being hurt or damaged in some way.

Lyubomirsky and colleagues reviewed 225 papers and found that feeling good is associated with things like, feeling confident and optimistic, feeling capable, sociability, seeing the best in others, activity and energy, helpfulness, immunity and physical wellbeing, effectively coping with challenge and stress and originality and flexibility. We can easily see how these would help with motivation and tenacity in achieving goals.

Some of their findings

1. Positive affect and job performance is bi-directional e.g. each affects the other
2. Happy people seem to be more successful at work, in their relationships and experience better health
3. Happy people set higher goals for themselves
4. Happy people are more willing to do things beyond the call of dut
5. Happy people are more successful across domains of marriage, friendship, income, work performance and health.

 So effectively yes, happiness does lead to success.

What does all this mean for us?

The key to happiness is frequent positive mood states that outweigh negative mood states by at least a 3:1 ratio. When we are happy good things are more likely to happen and we can generally cope with life better. To pro-actively manage our mood states is a good investment for us and our organizations.

Some questions to help you think how to use this information

How well do you know your mood boosters? How do you find reasons to be cheerful, and how do you help others to do that? How effectively do you build them into your daily, hourly-even life? How good are you at spotting when the ratio is slipping and finding a way to boost your mood?  How can you help others with this?

Lyubomirksy S, Diener E, and King L (2005) The Benefits of Positive Affect: Does happiness lead to success? Psychological Bulletin Vol 131.No. 6. Pp 803-855

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more about Performance Management in the  Knowledge Warehouse.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Ten Classic New Broom Mistakes

The pressure on new leaders or senior appointments to make an impact, and quickly, is tremendous. The organization has spent time and money attracting, selecting and securing the chosen candidate, now they want to see the value they have bought. It’s a brave person who can hold fire while they take time to look and learn; take time to find out what works here, and how it does; to find out who the people are who really ensure the work gets done; to find out who is brave enough to deliver bad news. This knowledge is often hidden, while, to new eyes, what doesn’t work, who doesn’t look or behave like management behaviour, and who too often isn’t at the end of their phone or at their desk, is all too obvious. In their attempts both to improve things and make a mark quickly, New Brooms frequently commit one or all of these mistakes:

1.They Believe in Year Zero. New Brooms often act as if everything that happened before their arrival is irrelevant. They have no interest in why things are the way they are, they know only that they are wrong. The wholesale change that follows as they (re)create the organization in the image of their last organization, or a textbook organization, tramples over history, accidentally throwing out precious babies with the bath water.

2.They Create Tomorrow’s Problems. ‘Today’s problems are yesterday’s solutions.’ said Senge.  And it follows that today’s solutions are tomorrow’s problems. New Brooms, in their enthusiasm to create new solutions, often inadvertently create the foundations for the next set of problems, for the next new person to solve. The experience on the ground can be of repeated extreme pendulum swings.

3.They Create Ground Zero. This approach often accompanies the Year Zero mentality: since nothing created before I arrived is of value, nothing will be lost in its destruction. Creating ground zero usually starts with the drawing up of a new organizational chart followed by frenzied activity restructuring, firing and rehiring, redrawing all paper work (job descriptions etc.), and retraining to create the brave new world. All too often the map changes but the terrain remains the same

4.They Have The Answer. At last our leader is in a position of power where they can put this great new idea they have come across into practice: LEAN, Team-based working, BPR. The list of management fads from which to choose is endless. The trouble is that there is no one right way to organize. Organizations are full of irresolvable tensions, they are dynamic entities that flux and flow, seeking to resolve the irresolvable. In this way they can keep everything in play. Once there is only one answer, only one way, the benefits of equi-finality and fluidity are lost.

5.They Love Tidiness. This approach is often related to having the answer. To the newcomer the evolved solutions are messy. The organizational chart is not neat, things aren’t arranged logically, the rationales for the way things are done are idiosyncratic, it doesn’t seem equable, everything is an acceptable exception. Like Trinny and Susanna they tear through the mess, creating order, boxing things up, cloning and standardizing. Everyone must start at 8.30, no exceptions. Bang goes the best customer service girl we ever had, who can’t get in until 8.45. Tough!

6.They Cut Through The Gordian Knot. Our new broom doesn’t have the time or the inclination to engage with office politics, so pretends they don’t exist. As they set about finding out what’s what, they dismiss any notion of being manipulated by the players. It’s easier to take everything at face value and then apply their own superior 20/20 vision to get to the truth. Often the people who lose out are those who really don’t know how to play politics and who strive to deliver a truth, as everyone else angles to demonstrate their irreplaceable value

7.They Believe Context Is Irrelevant. Leaders who believe they are impervious to office politics often also believe that context is irrelevant. They have a plan for change. There will be winners and losers. It’s very cold out in the employment market at present. The leader is in a very powerful position, determining people’s futures. Without a lively awareness of this context, it is very easy to mistake people’s quest to retain job security with the expression of a heartfelt endorsement of the new leader’s genius and a real desire for change. From here it is all too easy to get rid of dissenting voices.

8.They Fire the Opposition. The new leader is insecure: they need to prove their worth. They don’t want to hear that their plan has flaws, that there are benefits to the current, irregular, way of doing things. Expression of such thoughts is heard as disloyalty, easier to label such dissenters as resistant to change.

9.They Devalue Social Capital. The new leader is seduced by the organizational chart and all the paperwork that dictates who must report to whom, how the job must be done. Focused on this they fail to notice the intricate and delicate relating patterns, communication, information flow, informal problem-solving, that facilitate effective working. Seeing such informal networks as essentially irrelevant to achieving the task, they (re)arrange people without regard to these informal relationships and communication. The social capital of the organization is reduced, its efficacy damaged.

10. They Disregard Sense-making As A Powerful Change Process. Too often a new broom is overly focused on the behaviour change they require, and they work hard to ‘make’ people do things differently. Failing to appreciate that our behaviour is related to how we make sense of the world, they invest little time in working to change people’s mental maps, their experience of reality. They work to drive new behaviour into people rather than to release it.

Want to do it differently?

Appreciating Change can help you discover the strengths of the existing organization, can help you see and appreciate the less tangible assets such as the social capital, before you tear into making wholesale changes.

We can help you work with existing complexity, realizing the value of the evolved equi-finality, flexibility, diversity and difference before you become overwhelmed and seek to simplify by standardizing, and reducing complexity.

We can help you ‘be active’ in your engagement with the organization in ways that build on the best of what exists, that help people actively and willingly engage with new realities, and that grow positive change, before you lose patience and decide to impose a brave new world order.

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more 'Thought Provoking' articles and more about Leadership in the  Knowledge Warehouse.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Charming Devils And The Mischief They Make

It is increasingly apparent that sometimes people with severe personality disorders (narcissistic, psychopathic, paranoid and schizoid) slip through the organizational selection net. The problem is they don’t appear in our midst with ‘trouble’ tattooed on their foreheads, instead they are often rather charming devils who do very well until they fall (and bring everyone else down with them).

How to reduce the chances of appointing a chancer, a megalomaniac, an egoist, a drama queen, or an obsessive, to your team

Beware that their failings come disguised as virtuous traits, as they bring almost an excess of a good thing. So the dimensions can look like this…

•    Work focused – workaholic – obsessive/compulsive

•    Team player – dependency on others – can’t make individual decisions

•    Action focused – decisive – rushed, rash and impulsive – dictatorial

•    Analytical – paralysed – unable to act

•    Integrity – strong values – rigidity/cult leader

•    Innovative – enthusiastic/ committed – unrealistic

Spotting trouble in your midst:

Someone who has the following characteristics…

Is all things to all people

About whom people hold deeply divided opinions (seen as saving angel by some and dangerous devil by others)

Who wields disproportionate power to their status

Can skillfully play individuals, telling them what they want to hear

Has an uncanny ability to make bad things, things that don’t work, and people in their way, disappear (Teflon man / woman)

Lies and cheats with impunity in the service of some greater goal, and

Demonstrates loyalty only to self

…just might be displaying strong psychopathic tendencies. As they advance up the organization and external control and non-deferential feedback lessens, the bigger the mess they can create.

How can you lessen the likelihood of this happening to your organization?

1. Be brave enough to let go of the problem people early
2. Select for optimal not maximal qualities
3. Do proper biographical tracking history on your top appointments
4. Beware of trading off weaknesses for some great strength
5. Use 360 degree feedback, and listen to what those of no current ‘use’ to the person have to say. The once seduced and now discarded may have a less enamoured view of the charmer
6. Give leaders a stable deputy and make sure they have adequate power to influence, control, veto leadership action i.e. make sure they don’t gain absolute power!
7. Offer support to help self-management such as coaches, mentors, therapists

Sarah Lewis and colleagues at Appreciating Change are accredited to use the Hogan suite of personality psychometrics including The Dark Side instrument. Such psychometrics can help identify those at risk of going seriously off the rails!

(Furnham 2007, The Icarus Syndrome, People and organizations @ work spring edition, Trickey, Talent, treachery and self destruction paper at ABP conference 2007)

Other Resources

Recommended read: Snakes in Suits, Bob Hare

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more about Leadership and Performance Management in the  Knowledge Warehouse.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Many Hands Make Light Work: Crowd-Sourcing Organizational Change Using Appreciative Inquiry

Barack Obama famously crowd-sourced the finance for his election campaign, a powerful example of the ability of new technology to create a great aggregate result out of lots of small voluntary actions. But this process is not as new as it seems: Sir James Murray used a similar approach to creating the Oxford English Dictionary back in 1897.

So while crowd-sourcing is a new and sexy concept, it really refers to the age-old process of recruiting groups to complete tasks that it would be difficult if not impossible for one person to complete alone.

Wikipedia, itself probably the most ubiquitous example of a crowd-sourced product, defines it thus: ‘Crowd-sourcing is a process that involves outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people. This process can occur both online and offline. The difference between crowd-sourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific body, such as paid employees.’ But it also says ‘Crowd-sourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model.’ 

Volunteerism: In house crowd-sourcing

It seems to me that the crucial distinction is the voluntary nature of the participation rather than necessarily the paid/unpaid divide. In other words can crowd-sourcing be said to occur when people are not compelled to do the tasks by a job contract, but volunteer to be part of an organizational project. It is this volunteer element that makes me think Appreciative Inquiry can be seen as a form of in-house crowd-sourcing.

Appreciative Inquiry is an approach to organizational development that originated when David Cooperrider noticed how organizational growth and development can stem from understanding and building on past successes as well as on understanding and solving problems. As he and others experimented with focusing on learning from success and growing more of what you want in an organization, rather than concentrating solely on eliminating what you don’t want, they evolved a methodology based on clear principles of organizational life. One of these is the principle of positivity, which basically suggests that change takes energy, and that positive energy (feeling good) is a more sustainable source of energy for change than negative energy (feeling bad). When the field of positive psychology emerged at the end of the 1990s it fitted perfectly with Appreciative Inquiry’s emphasis on achieving excellence through focusing on what works.

I was fortunately enough to stumble upon Appreciative Inquiry as an approach to organizational change and development in the 1990s and have been incorporating it into my work ever since. And the more I work with Appreciative Inquiry, the clearer it becomes to me that the volunteer aspect of the model is crucial to its success. In this way I see a connection between crowd-sourcing and Appreciative Inquiry. The power of Appreciative Inquiry is based on the power of the volunteer model in the following ways.

• Voluntary attendance

Ideally people are invited to attend the Appreciative Inquiry event. The event topic, the nature of the event, and the invitation have to be sufficiently compelling that people prioritise being there of their own volition. When people make an active choice to invest their time in the event, they are keen to get a good return on that. When they are compelled to be there by management diktat, it can be a recipe for frustration, and even sabotage of the process.

• Voluntary participation

The voluntarism principle needs to extend to participation in any and every particular activity or discussion that is planned for the day. We never know what may be going on in people’s lives to make some topic of discussion unbearable. They may need, during the day, to prioritise their own need for some quiet time, or to make a timely phone call. It is my experience that when people are treated as adults constantly juggling competing priorities, trying to make good moment-to-moment decisions in complex contexts, they manage it very well, and with minimum disruption to the process.

• Voluntary contribution

One form of crowd-sourcing is the wisdom of the crowd. Again I quote from Wikipedia: ‘Wisdom of the crowd is another type of crowd-sourcing that collects large amounts of information and aggregates it to gain a complete and accurate picture of a topic, based on the idea that a group of people is often more intelligent than an individual.’ Calling on collective intelligence is a key feature of large group processes. However people are free to chose whether and what to contribute; so the event needs to create an atmosphere where people feel safe and trusting and so desire to share information and dreams and to build connection and intimacy. And of course the general principle doesn’t hold in every case, sometimes expert knowledge is more valuable and accurate than ‘the general view’.

• Voluntary further action

With most Appreciative Inquiry based events, at some point there is a shift from the process in the day to actions in the future. Often this involves forming project or work groups to progress activity. And the groups need members. Again group membership needs to be voluntary. The desire to contribute to changing things for the future needs to stem from the motivation and community built during the day. Forcing everyone to sign up to a post-event group activity, regardless of their energy, time or passion for the topic or project, just creates drag, and sometimes derails the whole process.

There are some of the ways in which I think Appreciative Inquiry can be seen as a form of in-house crowd-sourcing around the challenges of organizational change or adaptation. The ideal outcome of an Appreciative Inquiry event is that everyone is so affected by the event process, discussions, and aspirations that they are motivated to make small changes in their own behaviour on a day to day basis that will aggregate to a bigger shift, and even transformation within the organization as a whole. In addition they may volunteer to be part of specific groups working on specific projects. By definition these personal shifts in behaviour and the group project activity are above and beyond their job description: it is voluntary, discretionary behaviour. In this way, the voluntary basis of the Appreciative Inquiry approach qualifies it to be seen as a form of crowd-sourcing even though it is activity undertaken by paid members of an organization.

If you are interested in, or a convert to, the power of crowd-sourcing to get big things to happen with a small amount of effort from many people, then Appreciative Inquiry might be a way of bringing it into your organization.

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques to boost engagement at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more about Appreciative Inquiry in the  Knowledge Warehouse.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Ten Top Tips For Weathering The Storm With Strengths Enhancing Appreciative Leadership

First Off - Don't Panic Or Feel Trapped

When disaster strikes, under the intense pressure to do something fast, it is very easy for leaders to make quick, isolated obvious decisions i.e. to have a round of redundancies. Very few people like to have to do this, but often feel they have no alternative. However alternatives are available, what they demand is a willingness to go beyond simple and obvious solutions and to call upon the wisdom and goodwill of the workforce. A leader who is willing to work appreciatively with his or her workforce in finding ways to survive and thrive in these challenging trading times will reap the benefit now and later.

Here are ten top tips for showing appreciative leadership to weather the storm

1. Stay creative. Don’t get drawn into ‘there is no alternative’ solutions or decisions. There are always alternatives; sometimes they are harder to see than the obvious solutions.

2. Work with choice over compulsion. If you need to cut the wages bill consider ways other than compulsory redundancies. Clearly voluntary redundancy and early retirement are good first places to go. Ask if anyone is interested in unpaid leave or working part-time for a while. Then spread the pain and include yourself. For instance you could reduce everyone’s working week and pay by 20%, including your own. Fix a date for review. Yes this is likely to introduce a scheduling challenge. What are your managers for? Make it clear that people have choices to work with you or to choose to leave if they think they can do better elsewhere.

3. Don’t cancel Christmas! Just do it differently. For many people it’s a huge job perk. And it’s effectively a reward for their work and loyalty over the year. Cancelling the Christmas party will be experienced as a punishment (the withdrawal of something nice in the environment) by many people. Instead get creative. How can you still provide a party for your staff on a less extravagant scale? Involve them in this question. Make it clear you still want to create the opportunity for an organizational celebratory gathering but the budget has, understandably, contracted, what ideas do they have for creating a cheap, fun event? Call on your people’s strengths, who is the natural party animal, who will be motivated to find a way to make it happen? Delegate and empower, you have other things to worry about.

4. Create and spread messages of hope not doom and gloom. Such messages might be around the themes that you have faith in your people, that this too will pass, that this slack time creates opportunities for investing in refining and improving processes, that the organization can emerge stronger and so on.

5. Use the intelligence, creativity, and resourcefulness of the whole organization. Don’t feel, because you are the well-paid leader, that you have to do it all yourself. People will be as keen as you that the organization survive. They won’t be as aware of you of the immediate dangers because they don’t have access to, nor do they focus on, the forecast figures. So, you will need to create and provide structures and processes to allow people collectively to understand, contribute and influence. Sending out a memo asking for ideas is unlikely to be sufficient. There are many existing methodologies that can help with this: Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space Technology, Workout and other large group techniques.

6. Welcome volunteerism. You may only be able to pay for 4 working days but in the interests of the organization’s survival some people may be willing to work more. Welcome, appreciate and put to good use such offers, don’t assume or take for granted such support. Don’t penalize those who, for whatever reason, can’t do more. Ask and appreciate, don’t demand and expect.

7. Welcome flexibility. Put your people on the most important task. This may not be their usual task. ‘All hands to the pumps’ is a call people recognize and understand. Play to their strengths. If the most important task is talking to customers and potential customers then maybe some of your people could team up with a sales person to do their admin so they can spend more time actually talking to customers. Who has ‘informal’ relationships with your customers and could be called into play? Identify natural strengths, train in anything else needed.

8. Talk to your people. Share your knowledge in a carefully framed way. This is a time for inspirational leadership. It is also a time for humbleness and honesty. You need to combine an awareness of the scale of the challenge and of the hopefulness of success. You can’t make all the changes necessary to adapt quickly to new circumstances on your own or by diktat. To coin a phrase, it really helps if people want to change. Work to motivate them through hope and a belief in the future, not fear and despair about the present.

9. Be visible. Spread faith and confidence by your presence. Talk to people; be available for people to talk to. Resist the temptation to lock yourself away solving the problem. Ensure that your management team is out getting the best from their people, not locked away obsessing over spreadsheets.

10. Above all don’t panic, don’t allow others to panic, and don’t be panicked by the anxiety of others. People in a panic are rarely able to think creatively or flexibly, or to create confidence in others. Stay calm, create choice, involve others, offer affirming and appreciative leadership and find some support for yourself to enable you to do this.

To behave like this when all around you are going for the quick win of shedding longstanding and loyal staff is not easy. This is the time to recognise your organization as a collection of people of whom you have the privilege to lead. Recognise them as honoured followers, call out the best in them. Make it everyone’s challenge and not just yours to find ways to survive and thrive that are as good for the people, the organization, the present and the future as they can be.

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques to boost engagement at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more 'How To' in the  Knowledge Warehouse.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Ten Top Tips For Courageous Conversations At Work

What Not to Do

Many people at some point in their working lives have to have a difficult conversation with someone. It might be about a performance issues or something more personal. It can be with a peer, a subordinate or indeed a boss. Very often people are highly anxious, understandably so, about having this conversation. They then either avoid it for so long that when they do tackle it it comes as a complete shock to the other party, or they rush at it like a bull in a china shop just to get it over with. Here are some tips to help produce a good result.

Being Courageous

1.Be clear what you are trying to achieve

You need to be clear in your own mind why you are putting yourself through the trauma of having this conversation and what you hope to achieve. Is it an apology, an agreement about something, a change in behaviour in the future, some sort of restorative action or maybe a resubmission of a piece of work? Be clear what the successful outcome is and be listening for it.

2.Be clear what you are listening for

Being highly anxious can make us deaf. We become so focused on saying everything we have planned to say that we fail to hear the other person quietly saying ‘you’re right’ or ‘I know’ or even ‘you might have a point.’ ‘You bet I have!’ we say and then return to our carefully prepared speech. You need to stay alert to the first signs that you have made your point and be prepared to switch modes to ‘Ok what next’ even if you haven’t said everything you intended. Otherwise you run the risk of producing a new source of conflict as your conversational partner feels unfairly berated when they’ve made a concession. This can sabotage the chances of recovery.

3.Be clear what gives you the right to initiate this conversation

It really helps us reduce our anxiety if we can understand how the conversational intent aligns with our values. For instance you may have to tell someone that they didn’t get the promotion they were after, and give some hard feedback as to why. The clearer you are that giving this feedback is, for example, helpful behaviour(and it is important to you to help and develop others) then the easier say what needs to be said about the current shortfall in their experience, manner, etc. if they are to succeed in the future. Fobbing them off softly is easier but less helpful to them in the long run.

4.Give thought to how you set up the meeting

There are pros and cons to giving advance notice of wanting to have a difficult conversation with someone. The downside is there may well be a drop in productivity as they become distracted wondering what it about. There is also the danger that their anxiety will drive them to push you to ‘just say it now, let’s get it over and done with’. On the other hand, springing it on them unexpectedly can lead them to feel ambushed or tricked in some way. It’s a judgement call and depends on the situation and circumstances.

5.Look for the positive in the situation

Sometimes bad outcomes are the result of good intentions. Was the behaviour caused by a strength in overdrive? For instance maybe ‘too pushy’ can be reframed as a strength of will, zest or tenacity being used with greater force than was appropriate, or where negotiation strengths were needed. Was there an honourable intention behind the behaviour? Many mistakes start out as good ideas or intentions. Be alert to any good consequences that occurred in the situation you want to address as well as the problematic outcome. All of these give you a way to approach the behaviour that make it more likely the other person can owe it, still feel good about themselves, and be open to making changes.

6.Listen first

It is often a good idea, once you have outlined the area, topic, incident that you want to discuss to give the person a chance to give their view on the situation. Many a manager taking this approach has found the other person only too aware that there is a problem, or an issue, or something didn’t go right and that they have been making themselves miserable over it. Of course you’ll also have people who take the opportunity to ‘get their defence in first’ but at least you have the lie of the land before you say your piece, and indeed you may not need to say much at all.

7.Offer reassurance

There is an art to building and maintaining the relationship bridge while trying to convey information or a perspective that the other person might find hard to hear. Think about an opener such as ‘I feel this conversation may be difficult, but I am confident it will be to the benefit of both of us.’  Or ‘my sincere hope is that we come out of this conversation with a shared understanding of what happened and how we can make things better.’

8. Be honest about the effect on you

The more able you are to be honest about your motivation for having the conversation, the more likely you are to be acting and talking with integrity. Authenticity and integrity tend to produce better responses in others. So say something like ‘to be honest I felt really embarrassed when... and I like to feel proud of my team when... that’s why I want to...’ This isn’t about trying to ‘guilt trip’ anyone; its about being honest about your investment in this as well as the favour you are hoping to do them.

9. Use descriptive not evaluative language

Try to stick to an account that articulates what you saw and the consequences in a way that is factual and could be verified by any other observers. Steer away from evaluators like ‘aggressive’ and say instead something like, ‘you were speaking in a louder than a normal speaking voice, leaning in very close to B. Your face was going red and your forehand bulged. I also noticed B leant backwards and raised her hands. She didn’t speak for the rest of the meeting. Later B came to me and said she felt intimidated by you in that meeting.’ Here you can add your concern, ‘My concern is that if B feels like that we will lose her input to the discussion. I know you are very passionate about this topic. I need both your inputs. Let’s see if we can find a way where you both feel able to make your points.’

10. Look forward to solutions, not backwards to blame

The aim of the discussion, if possible, is to create a common agreement about the situation now without getting too lost in counter-arguments about blame in the past. It doesn’t have to be complete consensus, just enough to allow the conversation to move productively the next stage of finding ways forward that are acceptable to you both.

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques to boost engagement at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more 'How To' in the  Knowledge Warehouse.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership and Culture change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Ten Reasons Why Now Is The Time For Appreciative Inquiry

If you've heard about Appreciative Inquiry and know, or have an inkling, of what it can do and the difference it can make but can't face trying to change mindsets in your organisation or with your clients, here are some talking points to use to marshall your arguments!

1. Change is changing

Traditional, top-down, designed then implemented change takes too long and is too hard to push through an organization. The plan is out of date almost as soon as it’s made. People resist. Change needs to be fast, flexible and proactive and focused on maximising tomorrow’s possibilities rather than rehashing yesterday’s mistakes. Change needs to take everyone with it. Appreciative Inquiry is a change methodology for our changing times.

2. Feeling good is good for business

Positive psychology research shows that positive workplaces, where people feel hopeful, encouraged and appreciated, reap many benefits. People are likely to be more creative, more generative, share information better, grow and learn better, be more energized, be bolder and braver about innovating, be able to deal with more complex information, and respond better to change. Appreciative inquiry builds positive energy. Appreciative inquiry helps people feel good in the hardest of circumstances

3. The future exists only in our imagination

Imagination is more powerful than forecasting in an unpredictable world. The past does not predict the future: it suggests possible trajectories. Using our imagination we can create other, more attractive, more creative, more inspiring trajectories, to inspiring and attractive futures. Collective imagining has the power to create dreams that pull people to work together to achieve them. We can use our analytic powers to analyse data, we can use our creative powers to imagine pictures of the future that pull us towards it. Appreciative Inquiry uses the power of imagination

4. The best organizations positively flourish

Interestingly research shows that being good and doing well go together. The organisations that focus on creating positive cultures, and leading with values, where people thrive, where the organisation flourishes, where there is a bias towards the positive, where there is a sense of abundance, often also do very well commercially. Timberland, Merek Corporation, Cascade, Synovus Financial Corporation, Fedex Freight, Southwest Airlines and the Marine Corp are all a testament to the possibility of doing the right thing and doing well. Appreciative inquiry is a values based change approach that focuses on doing right and doing well.

5. Social capital is a source of sustainability

Relational reserves are what see organizations through difficult times as much as financial reserves. Relational reserves is the goodwill your people feel towards you, the trust they have in what you say, the willingness they demonstrate to forgive leadership errors, or accept bad luck, and work with you to put things right. It is built over time through building social capital.  Appreciative Inquiry builds social capital

6. Speed is of the essence

The world is constantly changing, organizations need to be nimble and flexible, able to recast themselves to meet new challenges; and quickly. Cascading change takes too long. Change needs to happen simultaneously from top to bottom. Appreciative inquiry works with the whole system simultaneously, so the need for change is experienced, absorbed, understood from top to bottom. And ideas for change are designed and tested for impact by, and on, those they affect before the money is spent.

7. Resistance costs too much

Planned change frequently induces resistance. Resistance slows down change and diverts managerial energy and attention. It also frequently illuminates unforeseen problems and obstacles to the change that cost money to put right at this late stage in the change process. Resistance to change costs both negatively (wasting time and energy) and positively (helping the organization make necessary corrections). Appreciative inquiry works positively with all reactions to change to co-create a sustainable, valued, endorsed and appreciated approach to change. Resistance is no longer part of the change conversation.

8. Change is not a commodity to be bought

Organizations put a lot of energy into getting ‘buy-in’ to their plans for the future. This activity comes after the plans have been made when other people have to be persuaded of the rightness of the plans. Appreciative inquiry involves those affected by change from the start. Helping to co-design it, bringing their expertise to bear at an early stage, being heard, being valued, having a role in shaping their destiny, co-creating a future that holds attraction for them, means that people have built it themselves and don’t need to be sold it. Appreciative Inquiry achieves this.

9. We need to use our intelligence

The world is more interconnected that ever before. Everything affects everything else. We need all the intelligence we can get to keep up and get ahead. Treating most of the organization as ‘hired hands’ and only the top echelons as the brains of the business wastes a huge amount of organizational intelligence. Appreciative Inquiry brings all brains, and experience, and skill, and knowledge, in the system to bear on the challenges of keeping up, getting ahead, doing right, doing well and flourishing.

10. Strengths are a source of competitive advantage

Organizations spend too much time trying to fill gaps in people’s profiles, adapt people’s personalities, and helping them become better at things they aren’t good at. And not enough time on building on strengths and abilities. Positive psychology research demonstrates that the more time spent working to their strengths, the more productive, fulfilled and energized people are likely to be. Building on the strengths of individuals, and building on the strengths of the organization creates a strength-based organization. Such an organization has a competitive advantage. Appreciative inquiry is a strengths-based approach.

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques to boost engagement at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on Appreciative Inquiry.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with bringing Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques to your workplace.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Five Tips For Getting Started With Positive Psychology At Work

Positive psychology is the new domain of psychology that burst upon the world when Martin Seligman coined the phrase at his inaugural speech as the President of the American Psychological Association in 1998.

He issued a rallying call for research into human success. He wanted us to know more about what helps us excel, in health, in sport, in achievement. His work, and that of others who responded to the call, has been picked up by institutions as varied as the American Military and the education system. We know more now than we ever did about how to help people live happy and successful lives. The ideas have spread to Governments, with our own deciding to take regular measures of national wellbeing as well as national wealth.

Positive psychology can be applied in the workplace. Its successful application will help you develop an engaged, productive, healthy workforce, and to create a great place to work. Here are some direct and practical ideas of how to apply the best of the results of the research into positive psychology to your workplace.

Losada and Heaphy in 2004 demonstrated that feeling good is good for us. In their research the teams that offered each other at least three times more praise than criticism were the most successful. Since then Fredrickson has made a study of what good emotions do for us, and Shawn Achor has brought all the research together in his great book ‘the happiness advantage’ also available on youtube as a Tedx talk. The result is conclusive: happiness leads to success. So, how can you help your people feel good?

Feelin' Good

1. Start meetings with a round of success stories.

Before you get into the meat of the meeting, usually a litany of problems and challenges, start by giving people the opportunity to share the best of their week.

2. Build the sharing of great stories about the achievements and success of the organization into your induction programme.

Get the owners of the stories to share their best moments of working for your company. Even better, equip your new recruits with appreciative questions about when people have been most proud to be part of the organization, or their greatest achievement at work, and send them off to interview people. This will leaven the dough of getting to grips with the staff handbook and inspire your new recruits.

3. Educate your managers about this research.

Too many managers are quick to offer critical feedback and slow to offer praise, hoarding it as a scarce resource. Explain that they need to keep the ratio of positive to negative comments and experiences above 3:1 and preferable 6:1 if they want to get the best from people.

4. Give them the tools to do this. 

Particularly, introduce the concept of diamond feedback and train people in its use. Diamond feedback is when you both report the behaviour you saw that you thought was good, and give the praise. E.g. ‘ I listened to how you handled that customer call. The way you admitted our errors and thanked her for letting us know was really good. I could hear that you saved a customer we might have lost. That’s worth a lot of money to us. Well done, that was great work.’

5. Help people use their natural strengths

Another finding coming through from the positive psychology research is that helping people understand what their natural strengths are and how to use them aids performance. Using strengths is energising and engaging for people. This means they find work that calls on their particular and unique strengths profile motivating. The more you can help people find ways to use their strengths at work, the more likely it is that they will become self-motivated in their work. But first they need to know them.

How You Can Do This

There are a number of strengths identifying tools around, particular the StrengthScope psychometric, which also has a great set of support cards. However in a low tech way we can just ask people ‘When are you at your most energised at work?’’ What feels really easy and enjoyable for you that others sometimes struggle with?’ and most interesting of all ‘what can you almost not, not do?’

Once you know your own strengths, find ways to use them more at work and, equally important, ways to do less of the work that drains you of energy. Find someone to delegate it to for whom it plays to their strengths. We’re not all detail people, but some of us love combing through data with a fine tooth-comb. Reconfigure how you achieve the objective so it plays to your strengths. Pair up with someone whose strengths complement yours. Allocate tasks in your team by strengths rather than by role and delegate by volunteer rather than imposition when possible.

Make sure other people know your strengths, so that they can call on you for opportunities that play to your strengths.

Positivity and strengths are probably two of the headline findings from the positive psychology research that are easily applicable to the workplace setting. However there are also other emerging findings that are of interest. For example, did you know that how you respond to someone’s good news is as important for relationship building as how you respond to their bad news? Apparently so. To encourage positive relationships at work, help people to be actively positive in their response to other people’s good news. This means not just saying ‘that’s great’, but actively inquiring into how they did it, how they feel and how they hope to build on it.

And finally, you may have noticed how some people are just people that other people like to have around. They give people around them a general good feeling. People are attracted to them. The research confirms the existence of such people at the centre of networks of positive energy. They have the knack of giving people little boosts of good feeling in their conversations or interactions with them, and they leave feeling better than when they arrived. These people are gold dust in terms of organisational motivation and performance. Notice who they are, place them strategically in projects and initiatives to which you want to attract other people, for example.

Futher Reading

This article has barely scratched the surface of the interesting research and ideas emanating from this field. The book ‘Positive Psychology At Work’ explains these and other ideas in more detail. For these with an aversion to books, we also have a set of development cards that offer bite-sized explanations of twenty core positive psychology concepts, with questions to help understand them and suggestions of how to integrate the concept at work.

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques to boost engagement at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more 'How To' guides in the Knowledge Warehouse.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership , Engagement and Culture change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Five ways to foster innovation using Appreciative Inquiry

First Off, What's Appreciative Inquiry?

Appreciative Inquiry is an approach to organisational change and development. Based on five key principles of practice, Appreciative Inquiry helps teams or organizations generate both positive energy and innovative ideas for change.

Appreciative Inquiry is a participative process, and the ideas that emerge from the process have the weight of the group behind them. This active co-creative process means that resistance to change and the need to achieve buy-in are much reduced if not completely eliminated. The action ideas that are generated and agreed are implemented by the very same people who created them.

Here are five ways Appreciative Inquiry can be used with teams or organisations to generate innovative ideas and action

1. Learn about what stimulates innovation in your context

Discovery interviews are an appreciative process that highlights the best of the past. By exploring past pinnacle experiences of innovation, creativity and inspiring change you can discover the group’s existing resources, skills and knowledge about when, and how, creative and innovative things happen.

Using discovery interviews you can learn about situations, contexts or questions that have been associated with particularly fruitful experiences in the past and actively work to re-create them in the present. In addition people’s current creativity is stimulated by the discussions that follow the questions, and they are likely to feel their creative juices starting to flow.

2. Use stories to jump start imagination

Discovery interviews tend to generate a lot of interesting, and often previously untold, stories about the topic under discussion. Sharing these stories acts as a spring-board to creativity. You can also bring in stories from other contexts that you find inspiring and think might add as a prompt to new thinking.

One way to use stories gathered during a round of discovery interviews is to share the story and then spend time brainstorming what ideas it has stimulated about the particular current context you are working in. Just leave them, or record them, as possibilities and move on to the next story.

3. Ask generative questions

Questions can produce new conversation and insights or they can stimulate old patterns of conversation. Questions that produce new thoughts, connections and ideas, in other words that are likely to generate innovative insights and ideas for action, tend to have certain characteristics.

• Element of novelty and surprise - They have an element of novelty and surprise; they are questions that people haven’t considered before and may well be surprised to be asked. Many positively framed questions are of this nature. However imagination based questions, or questions that ask people to combine two seemingly opposed ideas can also have this effect of producing new thought.
• Relationship building - They act to build relationships as people discover new things about each other: positive, inspiring and attractive things. They start to develop good feelings about each other and to develop mutual positive connection. Connections to others are key for change efforts. People need to feel needed, supported and valued to want to engage with the many challenges of working with others to achieve things.
• They are meaningful - Good discovery questions connect to things that are deeply meaningful to the participants. These are questions about important things – my work, my values, my experience. By asking about what matters to people and giving express permission to answer with reference to feelings, they act to ensure that people are psychologically engaged with the question, answer and process, not just rationally engaged.
• They cause a shift in understanding of ‘reality’ - Good generative questions act to reframe reality for individuals and the group. They do this by focussing on aspects of the context that are overlooked or ignored. In the simplest terms this means asking about positive things when ‘the reality’ is perceived to be wholly negative. The answers reveal many more positive things going on than people believed was the case, so their reality shifts.

Designing questions that have all these characteristics takes thought.

4. Dream together

An important part of the Appreciative Inquiry process is ‘dreaming’. This process involves using our imagination to leap out of the present, over the many current obvious problems and barriers to change, to a time in the future where we have achieved our aspirations to be better.

A good dreaming process acts to fire up the imagination and stimulates people to create attractive and hopeful images of the future. Usually a number of different groups create their own dreams and then the sharing of the dreams is another source of inspiration for individuals and the group as a whole.

In the same way that good science fiction creates impossible ideas that inspire later scientists to create what they saw on star-trek as a child, so good dreaming sessions expand the group’s sense of the possible. The creative horizon expands.

5. Improvise destiny

And finally Appreciative Inquiry is attuned to the improvisational nature of creative efforts. At the end of an AI workshop the group as a whole should have a shared sense of where they want to be heading, and the kind of futures they want to be creating With this shared sense acting as the ‘roadmap’ people need to be given permission to get on with making it happen, to be enabled to take voluntary and visible action. While the leader’s role becomes that of creating coherence and connection.

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques to boost engagement at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on Appreciative Inquiry and 'How To' guides.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Engagement and Culture change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

What Does It Mean To Talk About 'An Economy Of Strengths?'

By Jem Smith and Sarah Lewis

These ideas were first presented at a World Appreciative Inquiry Conference in Ghent in 2013.

For the workshop we attempted first to explore the key concept of efficiency to economies, and then how markets work, and then to ask the question, ‘ So, what does it mean to talk about an economy of strengths?’

Our personal interest

As an organisational psychologist Sarah is fascinated by the unquestioned acceptance, in most organisations, of ‘efficiency’ as the highest organisational priority, while Jem is an economist by training. David Cooperrider introduced the concept of ‘an economy of strengths’ for organizations and business, which caught both our imaginations.

First we examine the effects of the continual drive for efficiency.

The pros and cons of an ‘efficiency mindset’

Economic ‘efficiency’ brings immense benefit at the macro (societal) and organisational level. It also brings some unintended consequences, particularly mindlessness, a lack of redundancy (in complexity terms e.g. overlap or slack – with the attendant space for flexibility, purposeless interaction, incidental learning etc.), and a lack of respect for the full nature of being human. Efficiency is located in the Tayloristic model of organisation as a problem to be solved. At a society level, through market efficiencies, it introduces division and separateness (you shop at Sainsbury’s, me at Lidl’s, so our paths don’t cross). In other words there is a cost in poor social connectedness.

Social Connections

Societies have found various ways to mitigate some of these effects. Here I want to focus on the mitigation of the division and separation caused by efficient societal organisation. For example in feudal times we had Noblesse Oblige, the idea that the nobility had an obligation to look after and protect those who lived on the land that God had granted them. This made them worthy stewards of their inheritance. For centuries religious beliefs (most include alms giving) supported care for your neighbours and in the UK for the 50-60 years after the Second World War, the social compact (Welfare State), saw this role taken over by national governments. All of these work to maintain collective responsibility and awareness. They are, in effect, relational agreements. No one is saying they worked perfectly or necessarily defending the systems that produced the necessity for them, but at least there was an accepted need to mitigate the effects of division

Today

Today, the fragile ‘balance’ of the free market economy with mitigating social processes is breaking down. The relational agreements are under considerable strain. Behaviour is not as constrained, for many, by religious expectations as it once was; and the social compact is being dishonoured and the welfare state dismantled. At the same time financial systems are malfunctioning: they are not efficiently ensuring maximum wealth production, and, they are increasing societal inequalities as the lack of available capital for investment is adversely affecting ‘the small people’. It is a great time to be attending purposefully to this ‘balance’ that gets the best of what the free market does (its strengths) and the best of what relational connectedness can offer.

Future

Is this an opportunity to forge a new balance of ‘free market economics’ and ‘relational agreements’? Can we tweak our understanding of efficiency to accommodate this? Does our increasing ability to measure happiness, wellbeing and maybe even societal interconnectedness allow us to include these things in ‘what is measureable’ so that we can track, monitor and calculate how ‘efficient’ the market is being in a different way to present?

Secondly we ask – What is an economy?

An economy is a system to turn resources (land, machines, people's labour, fossil fuels etc.) into goods and services and then to distribute these to people in the economy. The best economic system is the one that makes the people in it happiest.

However there is only a limited amount of goods and services that can be produced under any system but people always want more. Economics is said to be about ‘using limited resources to best satisfy unlimited wants’. Also, by producing goods and services by working people give up their leisure time, which makes them less happy.

Choices must therefore be made, the aim of which is ‘efficiency’.

Prices

Why is it so important in achieving efficiency to use prices? The basic answer is that, usually, prices don’t lie.  Thus while people may tell you that they are willing to trade more expensive coffee for better terms for coffee growers, i.e. that knowing fair trade is happening makes them happier than getting cheap coffee, it isn’t until they see the price of fair trade coffee compared to Nescafe and then buy the more expensive one that the economy really knows that they want to make that trade-off, and therefore that it will make them happier.

Efficiency

The aim of economics is efficiency. There are two types of efficiency: productive efficiency (where you are producing the most goods and services that you can) and allocative efficiency (where you are distributing the goods/services in the way that produces the most happiness (what economists call ‘utility’) in society).

These can be achieved without uniformity in ideological approach. Thus you can have a free-market capitalist system in the production of goods and services and a much more socialist one in their allocation and still achieve efficiency in both.

Theory and experience has show that productive efficiency necessitates a free-trade, market-based approach (except where there is clear market failure, e.g. Healthcare, Education, Pollution) whereas allocative efficiency can be achieved in many ways, basically because it is unknown if inequality in the allocation of goods/services affects the aggregate happiness of society.

Thus Sweden, with its high growth and equality, and the United States, with its high growth and high inequality, are from a strictly technical point of view both equally successful economic systems, whereas Soviet Russia, with its state control of production and so low growth, was not.

There was a lot of discussion and interaction in the session; this is the document we produced afterwards that is a summary of those discussions.

Summary of thoughts from Ghent session: ‘Moving towards an economy of interconnecting strengths’

Connections

The focus is on happiness but from different perspectives.

The economy is connections, between people and resources and production and sustainability.

There is a connection between resources, how they are used and the sources of those resources and how sustainable they are.

There is a connection, though an imperfect one, between prices and value in the economy.

What makes people happy today?

The Future

It is important to change the view of the economy from a variety of competing models(Socialist vs. Free market etc.) to one of a family, each member with different strengths and weaknesses but working for a shared interest.

Organisations within the economy need to move towards being allocatively efficient as well as productively efficient.

Within organisations we must become braver and more independent in our behaviour for the good of the organisation and wider society, despite the risk to our jobs and pensions.

We must learn to look at the economy not so much from a perspective of scarcity as from abundance, particularly in terms of human potential.

Technology will create greater openness and access to information to the members of the economy, giving them greater power to make decisions affecting their own happiness.

This will cause the economy to move from being driven by the invisible hand to the transparent/visible hand.

Group Thoughts

Sheet 1

How do decisions we make about our how to achieve our happiness affect the happiness of others, particularly the young, now and for future generations?

We can take this into the world by having the children’s fire burn in every boardroom and school and community organisation.

We must educate the young on the value of strength as well as on the value of material things.

Sheet 2

How can you connect to the abundancy of the unlimited?

What image do you have of the economy?

When were you most proud of your work?

What was the best office (?) publicity that you have seen?

Sheet 3

Are you willing to stop thinking about £ $ € adding value, and start thinking about value?

Are you prepared to fire all your employees, and start working with friends?

Sheet 4

How would it be to offer your competitors your help? To be combined better for your clients, employees etc.

Can you re-define happiness?

How can we encourage children to ‘discover’ what created happiness and ‘dream’ as soon as possible?

Sheet 5

How can we visualise the value of happiness?

What are the KPI’s of happiness?

It was a very exciting session that raised more questions than answers, but people left stimulated and in some cases inspired to take action in their own quests to achieve a greater ‘economy of strengths’. Many said that it helped them connect their concerns with the language of business efficiency in a way they found extremely helpful.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership , Engagement and Culture change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Using Positive Psychology to Produce High Performing Teams

What is positive psychology?

Coined as a phrase by Martin Seligman as President of the American Psychological Association in 1998, positive psychology is the psychology of exceptionally good living. It embraces areas of study such as happiness; human flourishing; exceptional wellbeing; energy and vitality, meaningfulness and achievement. The switch in focus from psychology’s traditional concern with when things go wrong for people (mental or physical ill-health, poor educational performance etc.) to when things go right for people has resulted in a burst of new streams of research and new knowledge about the psychology of high performance in people.

Three things that make a difference

Three key areas of positive psychology that are relevant to the challenge of team performance are; positivity, strengths and motivation.

Positivity

Research in this area can be seen as a quest to answer such questions as: ‘What good are good emotions? What purpose do they serve? Why do we have them?’ In 2004 Losada and Heaphy discovered that a high ratio of positive to negative comments amongst team members in meetings was a reliable predictor of high performance. They postulate that positive comments lead to positive emotional reactions and we know that positive emotional states are correlated with many group phenomena such as sociability and social bonding; openness to information, creativity, coping with complexity, tenacity and motivation, and virtuous behaviour (patience, generosity etc.).

All of this acts on the group dynamics in a way that enhances connectivity amongst group members, greater creative in thinking and an increased ability to act in harmony with other group members and group objectives even when not in direct contact with each other. They call this dynamic ‘synchronicity’. They found that for these effects to be produced, the ratio of positive to negative comments and experiences needs to be between 3:1 to 12:1 positive to negative. Beyond this ratio there is a danger of a lack of critical examination of ideas.

What does this mean?

This means that if we can develop the linguistic habits in our team meetings of: building on the best in the ideas of others rather than knocking them down wholesale; expressing appreciation of helpful comments or contributions; thanking people for pointing out flaws or problems with ideas; laughing together and so on, we can have a direct impact on the performance of the team over time.

Strengths

It has always been recognised that people vary in their innate abilities. However our emphasis in the workplace has often been on trying to help people develop greater skill in their weaker areas. More recently a school of thought has grown up suggesting that helping people become better at what they are already good at is a more effective investment. The argument is that a natural strength plus skill in using it becomes a talent. Helping people understand their particular strengths, and then developing their skill and judgement in using it is being revealed to positively affect: performance, wellbeing, goal attainment, energy levels, authenticity, morale, motivation, fulfilment at work and meaningfulness.

What does this mean?

This means that at least some of your development effort should be focused on helping people understand their strengths profile. That consideration should be given to fitting jobs to people’s strengths profiles rather than fitting people to rigid job profiles. That teams should distribute tasks by strengths rather than necessarily by role. It seems likely that the more people are able to use their natural skills at work – a process that people find satisfying and energizing – the more likely they are to deliver dedication and high performance.

Motivation

Motivation is a fascinating topic. Why are we motivated to do some things and not others? Why do we find doing some things so rewarding that we will do it for nothing, just for pleasure and other things you couldn’t pay us enough to do? The answers to these questions are many, but a key thought is that it is related to our own unique personality, physiology, history and context. In this way motivation can be understood as a relationship between people’s unique needs and values and the environments that satisfy them. Motivation is a response made to an environment that provides opportunities, invitations and incitements to do things that the individual finds motivating. It seems we are motivated to use our strengths and talents because doing so makes us feel ‘our best selves’: energised, motivated, good about our selves and so able to be at our best with others. If we can find opportunities to use our strengths and talents, we are likely to feel motivated.

What does this mean?

This highlights that motivation is an individual process. Teams have to somehow create opportunities for everyone to feel motivated. This means something in the team process, goal or environment must produce opportunities for people to achieve things desirable to them (their needs and values), and to engage their strengths (energised, committed, meaningful). Appreciative Inquiry as a process facilitates both of these aspects of team working. The discovery phase helps groups and individuals identify existing strengths. The dream phase allows all voices to contribute to the creation of desirable images of the future. While the destiny phase encourages people to volunteer to create movement and progress in areas or projects that are motivating to them.

So how can I use positive psychology to help my team deliver high performance?

·      Encourage a positive atmosphere with a good ratio of positive to negative comment

·      Help individuals identify their strengths and enable them to use them in the team endeavour

·      Use appreciative inquiry processes to help the team develop a co-created image of the future state towards which they are working, and enable them to contribute to its achievement by using their unique strengths.

Further reading

Lewis, S., Passmore, J. and Cantore, S., 2007. Appreciative Inquiry For Change Management: Using AI To Facilitate Organisational Development. Kogan Page. London

Lewis, S.,  2011 Positive Psychology at Work: How Positive Leadership and Appreciative Inquiry Create Inspiring Organizations. Wiley-Blackwell. Chichester UK

Losada, M. and Heaphy, E., 2004. The Role Of Positivity And Connectivity In The Performance Of Business Teams: A Nonlinear Model, American Behavioral Scientist, 47, pp. 740-765.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership , Engagement and Culture change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Ten Top Tips For Creating Positive And Flourishing Organisations

This blog article has an accompanying article on positive culture, and an accompanying case study on culture change

Having recently extensively studied the literature, Appreciating Change can exclusively reveal the ten things that you can do that can make your organisation an even more inspiring and positive workplace.

  1. Play to everyone’s strengths

People playing to their strengths are effective, successful, engaged and energised. Their productivity is at its best. Those dutifully struggling with weaknesses are slow, ineffective and demoralised. Their productivity is poor.

  2. Recruit for attitude

People have ‘a good attitude’ when they are using their natural talents, the thing they love to do. Find out people’s natural talents and inclinations because these are the basis of strengths. Recruit for a fit with the core task of the job and to build it into a real strength.

 3. Encourage positive deviation

Encourage performance that exceeds the standard expected in a positive direction. Build an abundant organisation, one that can take pride in excellence. Achieving this takes positive leadership: encouraging, recognising, appreciative, and forgiving. Affirm what is good in the organisation to help it grow and develop.

4. Create a workplace that feels good

Positive emotions are really good for the workplace. They aid creativity, working together, problem-solving, communication and information-sharing, just for starters. Make your workplace somewhere people enjoy being because it makes them feel good.

 5. Build social capital

Invest in the relationships between people. It is through these relationships that information and resource flow to where they are needed. It is these relationships that allow organisations to be responsive to change and to bounce back quickly from trauma.

6. Be an authentic leader

Authentic leaders know their own strengths and how to use them well. They help others develop theirs. They have a strong moral compass and they treat people right. They learn from success as well as mistakes. They admit mistakes, and encourage others to do so too.

7. Create the conditions for change

Directive planned change is ineffective: the evidence is overwhelming. Effective change leaders create the conditions for change to emerge. They work with the emerging process of change. They engage the whole organisation in discovering how to go forward.

8. Create reward-rich environments

People work for many rewards: success, approval, flow experiences, recognition, feelings of satisfaction, thanks, completion, or being with others, for example. The more rewards available to people in their work environment, they more motivated and engaged they will be at work.

9. Make sense together

In this fast-paced, complex world, it is more effective to involve others in a continuous process of making sense than trying to make definitive decisions that will hold for years. Build periods of mindfulness and reflection into your schedule, to help people notice the early signs of a changing world.

10. Be appreciative

Develop an appreciative, eye, ear and tongue. This will help you recognise and grow the organisational strengths and resources. Our appreciative faculties are usually very weak compared to our critical ones; they need positive attention to thrive.

This blog article has an accompanying article on positive culture, and an accompanying case study on culture change

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership and Culture change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

How To Keep Your Employees Engaged

This blog article has an accompanying article on organisational flourishing, and an accompanying case study on activating  employee engagement

In 2005 David Bolchover took it upon himself to find out what actively disengaged employees do when at work (and also when not). Scouring the research, he found that:

•   1 in 3 people have taken illegal drugs at work: ecstasy, cannabis, and cocaine
•   1 in 5 people have had sex at work
•   70% of porn site hits happen during working hours
•   The actively disengaged have twice as much time off sick (and many of them are to be found at Alton Towers, apparently)
•   1in 5 people describe themselves as constantly surfing the net, while a majority of people estimate they spend the equivalent of a day a week on non-work websites at work
•   7% send more than 20 personal emails a day
•   1/3 of young professionals confess to being hung over twice a week at work; and
•   A quarter of people have fallen asleep at work

Active disengagement at work costs the UK economy about £38bn a year.

So what makes for active engagement at work?

Using strengths and talents

People encouraged to use their strengths at work are about 2 & 1/2 times as likely to be engaged as those who are encouraged to focus on their weaknesses. They are particularly more likely to be engaged if they get to use their strengths every day. Help people identify their strengths either with good psychometrics like strengthscope, or through Appreciative Inquiry discovery interviews and Feedback Strengths Cards such as those sold on this website.

Experiencing flow

When people are in flow they are engaged. Flow is by definition an engaging experience. Flow experiences occur at work but aren’t always recognised as such. Help people understand their flow experiences. To discover them, inquire into when they ‘lose’ themselves in their work, or ask them when they feel ‘in the zone’

The helpful use of goals and rewards

Much goal setting at work is poorly done. At its best goal setting provides opportunities for people to experience plentiful, positive and meaningful rewards (positive reinforcement). Working for social or self-satisfaction rewards can be highly motivating and engaging. The sustainable reward pattern is one that is self-reinforcing e.g. the more or better I do, the better I feel. The flourishing factor of accomplishment is an expression of this self-reinforcing rewarding activity.

Help people find meaning in work

When people are engaged in work that they experience as meaningful, they are more engaged. People can be helped to create positive meaning at work, particularly when groups are given the opportunity to collectively to discover why their work is meaningful to them, to the organisation, and to the world.

Create positive emotional experience moments

The research into positive emotions continues to demonstrate the powerful positive effects of a high ratio of feeling good moments to feeling bad moments. Create environments where positive moments: a shared laugh, sharing good news, pauses for wonderment at the achievements of others, happens often.

Encourage job crafting

Helping people to shape their roles and tasks in a way that maximizes their sense of meaningfulness, their ability to use their strengths, their self-reinforcement and the pleasure they can take in their work will boost their engagement and their performance.

This blog article has an accompanying article on organisational flourishing, and an accompanying case study on activating  employee engagement

More on using positive psychology to boost engagement at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Engagement 

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Positive Deviance: Learning from, and creating, exceptional performance

This blog article has an accompanying article on positive culture, and an accompanying case study on culture change

What is positive deviance and why is it a good thing?

Positive Deviance is an exciting methodology emerging from an understanding of organisations as complex adaptive systems. It helps organisations learn from those who manage to achieve better than normal outcomes from within the same resource constraints as their colleagues.

It is one of Kim Cameron’s distinguishing features for flourishing organizations: they both learn from and create positive deviance. Flourishing organizations are interested in exceptionally good performance and they learn from it. Some of the earliest examples of how learning from positive deviance can make a real difference comes from community work.

For example... 

For instance an early example of positive deviance was in a poor Vietnamese community. In this community there were many starving children yet some families were doing better than others in feeding their children. A positive deviance investigation by the villagers themselves revealed that the more successful families were taking shrimps and crabs from the rice fields i.e. had realised an additional source of protein. Some others were spreading their rice ration out over 24 hours, which is better for young children. These were things that theoretically everyone could do but not everyone did. These are positive deviance strategies. Of course there were also other factors such a having a rich relative who sent supplies. However these strategies are not available to others and so are known as true but useless (TBU) strategies. A key factor for the success of the intervention (i.e. achieving behaviour change) was they got the villagers themselves to do the investigation.

Positive Deviance investigations are being used very successfully to reduce super-bug infection rates in some hospitals. 

It is a very effective way of ‘growing’ a better culture. By recognising that small variations in performance always exist and by focussing on and amplifying the variations in a positive direction the whole organization can be encouraged to move in the direction of the best.

Appreciative inquiry as a methodology works on the same principle of identifying  positive deviance, learning from it, and increasing its presence in the organization.

When might investigating positive deviance be the way forward in an organisation?

With thanks to Lisa Kimball from Plexus

When…

• There is some existing deviance e.g. some people are doing better than others in a similar situation (performance variation across team or division)
• It’s a really intractable problem
• It involves behaviour change
• Everyone knows what to do, they are just not doing it
• The situation is bathed in data. It really helps if the groups can keep track of the changes they are making and their impact
• There is top leadership support. This means top leadership support the process through releasing resource, being responsive to early efforts and initiatives, and tracking, recording and amplifying results.

How to do positive deviance

1. Ask about success
2. Compare best to near best to tease out small differences that make a difference
3. Encourage peer to peer inquiry (and analysis) into success
4. Identify strategies for success (discounting TBU factors)
5. Support with behaviour change strategies
6. Support with top leadership resources: interest, budget, encouragement, action

This blog article has an accompanying article on positive culture, and an accompanying case study on culture change

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership and Culture change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Cultivating A Positive Culture

This blog article has an accompanying article on positive deviance, and an accompanying case study on culture change

What is a positive culture?

Cameron’s research has revealed three key distinguishing features that define a positive organisational culture. Essentially these are: an interest in learning from success to exceed standard performance; the cultivation of graceful behaviours such as helpfulness, patience, humility, forgiveness; and a bias towards spotting and affirming the good in people and situations.

The nature of culture

Organizational culture is fascinating. It is complex and paradoxical, slippery and intangible and yet highly impactful on organisational behaviour. It acts as a constraint on the possible for organizations. This becomes particularly pertinent when an organization decides it needs to change itself in someway. Organisational culture has a big impact on attempts at change while being highly resistant to change itself.

Changing cultures

Culture is as culture does. It is hard for organisations to step outside their existing culture, to act ‘as if’ they weren’t in their existing world. Attempts to ‘bring in’ or in any other way impose a new culture by diktat or plan or rhetoric is pretty much doomed to failure. New cultures need to be cultivated; they need to be grown from within the organization, which means exploring the variance that already exists within the organization to find that which already exists and is emblematic of the desired new culture. In addition we can create variance.

Growing cultures

When considering this, it is helpful to think of the organization as a complex adaptive system, that is, a living human system. From this perspective the organization is both created by, and constrains, the small daily habitual patterns of interaction and communication of everyone in the organization. These patterns are at the root of consistency (replication) and change (variation). Change these and you change the organization.

The patterns of behaviour are both products, and reinforcers, of our patterns of mind, that is, our habitual way of understanding the world. As we understand the world so we act. Change your mental models or underlying beliefs about the world and you change the action potential. Powerful experiences that can’t be accommodated by our existing world-views are the things that change our mental models. Such experiences can be located in either action mode or thought mode.

Exposing someone to different experiences can work to shift their views, for example sending the production manager out with a salesman to experience customer behaviour and need first hand. In a similar way creating events where people experience each other differently can shift their beliefs about each other as they discover aspects of and qualities in the person to which they had not previously been exposed.

Alternatively the powerful experience can be an internal one, for instance when we are asked a powerful question that causes us to have thoughts, make connections, see things that we haven’t up to now. The experience of being asked a really powerful question is akin to having the world shake on its axis as so many neurons unexpectedly fire off at once in response to the pinpoint accurate stimulus of a good question. Thought and action are interactive and iterative. To affect one is to affect the other. We often talk about the need for behaviour change in organisational change. Then we think in terms of training courses and job descriptions. Both of these are possibly useful. The smallest point of leverage though is to affect people’s understanding of the situation they are in by getting them to think differently by asking them different questions.

Why is culture change so hard to achieve in organizations?

Essentially because it is about social dynamics not formal structures, processes and procedures; these are surface phenomena and as such easy to change. To affect the social dynamics of an organization we need to work at the deeper level of recurring patterns of interaction, relationship and communication. Whole system change methodologies such as Appreciative Inquiry do exactly this.

So, how do we cultivate culture change?

• Recognize it as a moral act, a judgement call on what is ‘good’ and involve others in making these judgements
• Focus on patterns of interaction as much if not more than on individuals
• Ask world-shift questions of people, groups, the organization
• Identify and build on the positive core of values, strengths, resources, abilities and positive organisational experiences
• Use a methodology like Appreciative Inquiry to grow it not order it

This blog article has an accompanying article on positive deviance, and an accompanying case study on culture change

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership and Culture change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Ten Tips for Effective Strategic Development

This blog article has two accompanying case studies: Making Strategy Real and Open Space For Strategic Development

What is Strategy?

Organisations often think of strategy as a plan for achieving a specific future. This plan is created by a small group of people who then inform others of the vision of the future and how it will be achieved.

A Compass, Not An Alien Artefact

This process can result in the production of a strategic document that appears opaque if not irrelevant to the rest of the organization. I have sat with many a group attempting to ‘decode’ the strategic document just handed down from on high into something that is meaningful, useful or compelling in their local context. Generally the connection, the relevance, is more created than uncovered.

Strategy is the lodestar of organization: it creates direction and holds things together. Without a sense of the over-arching purpose, direction and values of the organisation it is difficult for people to prioritise amongst the many competing demands on their time and energy. A good strategy acts like an internal compass for all employees, enabling them to prioritise their activities against a common understanding of ‘the most important things’, even when working in isolation.

It is possible to create strategy in a way that understands it not as a plan handed down by omniscience others, but as a co-created organizational story of future direction and intent. Here are some tips for working with strategy in this way.

How To Build Your Compass

1. Invert the usual process

The usual pattern for strategic development is that a small group of people design ‘the strategy’ which they then attempt to get the rest of the organization, the large group, to adopt. It is quite possible, as our case study ‘Making Strategy Real’ shows, to invert this process by involving a large group of stakeholders in initial strategic conversations, which a small group then write up as the strategic document. This approach allows data analysis, theme identification, creation of new initiatives, commitment to outcomes, common vision, motivation and energy for change to be created simultaneously rather than in staged sequences. Given this, change is likely to happen much more quickly.

2. Create positive energy for change

Large group co-creative approaches such as Appreciative Inquiry or SOAR create energy for the change right from the start. However, if the organization is doing strategy more traditionally all is not lost. We know that inducing positive mood states and helping people identify their strengths helps people engage with change, even if it is imposed rather than self-generated. So create opportunities for groups to identify what they are doing that points in the new direction, the successes they are achieving, the changes they are making, and the resilience they are demonstrating as well as the endless opportunities for identifying shortfalls, delays etc. Spend time helping people identify their strengths and working out how to apply them every day.

3. Recognise that strategy is what people do

Strategic becomes a ‘lived’ process as people make different decisions, moment-by-moment, to those they made in the past. While big ‘strategic’ events are important for various reasons, it’s micro-moment differences and decisions that add up to change. Every conversation, every decision, every action is either pointing towards the desired future direction or away from it. However habitual behaviour, aligned to past strategy, is strong. Therefore attention has to be paid at the granular level to the language used and the way things are talked about, as well as to what is being done, to create new patterns.

4. Use ‘word and deed’ to create new organizational fields

Drawing on quantum physics, Wheatley identified that effective leaders implement new strategy by their words and deeds. They choose words and deeds that fill the conversational, meaning or  social space with clear and consistent ideas about the new strategy, for example how the customers are to be served. This kind of behaviour creates a new system ‘field’, one strong in congruence, influencing behaviour in only one direction. In effect they create a field of influence that make certain behaviours more likely.

5. Help people understand what ‘strategically aligned behaviour’ looks like

People often have difficulty translating the words on the page of a strategic document into ‘what it means for us’. One way to help people create a stronger vision and sense of what the new strategy looks like is to seek out early examples of behaviour that is ‘pointing in the right direction’ and to pro-actively amplify and broadcast these stories. These are stories that exemplify ‘yes, this is what we want, this is what we mean’. It’s hard for people to imagine things they have never experienced. Sharing stories that act as models of what is required helps people to ‘get it’.

6. Recognise strategy as an emergent process

Strategy becomes a lived reality in an organization through an emergent process. People have to feel their way into ‘doing’ the new strategy. Sometimes organizations act as if strategy can be dictated and people can start working in this new and different way with never a false step being made. This expectation hampers progress as people are afraid they will make a mistake, whilst also quickly creating the sense of things going wrong. Recognising the enactment of strategy as a discovery process, with false starts, blind alleys and a general iterative ‘two steps forward, one step back’ process, helps greatly in creating and sustaining momentum for change.

7. Retell the story of strategy around the organization

The strategic ‘story’ needs to be shared in many different ways in many different contexts with many different groups. We work out what we mean by what we say through this process of telling and retelling. The creation of strategy is not a uni-directional communication process, it is a collaborative co-creating dialogue process. Organisational understanding of what the words on the paper mean in practice emerges through shared dialogue.

8. Create a strategy that is both familiar and different

We can conceptualise strategy as a fiction. It is a fictional account of a possible future. Ideally it is a co-authored story (see point 1) but often it is a story created by some people that they need others to believe. To grasp and hold our interest stories need to be both credible and unfamiliar. Appreciative inquiry is perfect for this. The articulation of the best of past in which we recognize ourselves offers the ‘credible’ part of the story, while the following three stages, dream, design and destiny, offer the generative part of the story. During these phases, the organization creates a picture of itself that is built on the familiar yet is importantly different, new.

9. Make the strategy tangible

The way this is usually done is to produce a report. The printed word is more tangible, carries more weight, than just words. When we hold the document in our hands we can see that we have done something, much more so than when we emerge from a dialogue event with ‘just’ different ideas in our heads. The challenge is to go beyond just a document. How else can the organization make the new strategy tangible? Pictures, logos, diagrams are all part of this process. Encouraging people and groups to physically model (with Lego or plasticine for example) the past and the future, and then talking about the difference, can help with this.

10. Strategy is a verbal activity

Finally, as a summary of most of the above, it is important to recognise that strategy is a verbal activity. How we talk is different to how we write. The written strategy document is unlikely to be a direct source for effective verbal explanations. Different groups and different people need different approaches if they are to ‘get it’. Ideally the talking comes before the writing, so people can see their words in the document. But it is quite possible to reverse the process, helping groups create a verbal account of the handed down written word. Which I believe brings me back to where I started.

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership and Culture change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

How Working With Strengths Can Improve Performance

Our strengths are those abilities we have that are hardwired into our ways of doing things. They are a combination of genetics we inherited and the environment in which we were raised. By the time we are adults some neural pathways are much more practiced than others. We have habitual ways of being and behaving that we find effortless: indeed almost irresistible. These, in essence, are our strengths. We might use them for good or evil, with or without much skill, but they are our go-to, default way of being in the world. While they can and frequently do get us into trouble when applied badly or inappropriately, they are also our greatest asset. And yet....

'This isn't development, it's damage control'

Many of us have been diligently working for years to get better at the things that we are bad at. Time after time the same things come up in the performance appraisal, 360 degree feedback or the personality profile, time after time we resolve ‘to work on our weaknesses’ In this we are in good company.

•   87% of people believe that finding your weaknesses and fixing them is the best way to achieve outstanding performance. (Buckingham, 2007).

However as Buckingham says ‘this isn’t development, it’s damage control’. As someone with poor attention to detail, I live in fear of sending out incorrect invoices. My diligent attention to them, checking and double-checking is damage limitation indeed! And it takes me a disproportionate amount of time.

However, recent research suggests that we are wrong because:

• Excellence is not the opposite of failure
• Strengths are not the opposite of weaknesses
• We will learn little about excellence by studying failure
• We will learn little about our strengths by concentrating on our weaknesses
• By studying our mistakes we will learn more about how we make mistakes
• By studying our weaknesses we will learn more about ourselves at our worst
• If we want to learn about success, we must study our successes
• If we want to learn about our strengths we need to study ourselves at our best

Know your weaknesses

This isn’t to say that we don’t need to attend to our weaknesses, clearly we do. However we can be cleverer about how we do that. In an ideal scenario we fit the tasks to the strengths profile. My ideal bookkeeper (for my invoicing for instance) would be someone for whom attending to detail isn’t an anxiety-ridden, fraught activity where a mistake lurks undetected in every line, but is a delight, an engaging dance with perfection. While I emerge from the task with a sense of ‘fingers crossed’ they would emerge with a sense of ‘job well done’. (For those of you who are worrying about my ability to stay in business, I do now have an assistant who helps with the double-checking!). This of course is another way of dealing with weaknesses: getting help.

Invest your time where you get the best returns

With the time and emotional energy we save by not ‘working on our weaknesses’ we can concentrate on understanding and maximizing our strengths. The research demonstrates very clearly that excellence in individual and team performance is related to the awareness of, and exercise of, our strengths, on a daily basis.

• People who get the chance to play to their strengths every day are 50% more likely to work in teams with a low turnover, 38% more likely to work in productive teams and 44% more likely to work in teams with higher customer satisfaction scores. (Buckingham and Clifton, 2002)
• In high performing teams, people say they call on their strengths more than 75% of the time.

However,

• Only 17% of people use their strengths at work everyday. (Buckingham, 2007)

The jury is out – working on your strengths can help achieve great performance

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Sources

Buckingham, M. 2007 Go put your strengths to work, Simon and Schuster

Buckingham and Clifton,, 2002, Now discover your strengths. Free Press Business

Five Ways to Get Your Team Working More Effectively

Teams are the building blocks of organizations. Teams are groups of people who work together to achieve things, but not all groups are teams. Teams are characterized by interdependencies, in other words team members have to work together to get things done. While this interdependency creates the potential for the whole to be more productive and creative than the sum of the parts, it can just as easily be a recipe for frustration and conflict. How can you help your team get the most out of working together?

Create a positive working culture

Very few people like to be in an atmosphere that is critical, hostile, unfriendly or cold. Yet many teams manage to create precisely this culture because they overly focus on achieving the task and fail to account for basic human nature. Research over the last 10 years has convincing backed up what many of us intuitively knew, a good working atmosphere makes a huge difference to a team’s productivity. What the research found is that the key to the difference between high performing and low performing teams is the ratio of positive to negative comments in team meetings. Interestingly this doesn’t need to be in balance, it needs to be weighted in favour of positive comments, at least by a ratio of 3:1.

A number of things seem to happen once this magic ratio is reached and even more so if the ratio moves closer to 6:1. There is more positive affect ‘good feeling’ generated by the group when they are together. When people feel good they are more able to think well, be creative, and to work with others. In addition people become more willing to contribute ideas, and to work with goodwill through the moments of uncertainty, disconnection or confusion in the conversation until something new emerges. The benefits continue beyond the immediate team meetings, as team members’ actions in their own domains are more in sync with their colleagues, and so the departmental interface issues are lessened.

Help people play to their strengths

Many people have put much effort into attempting to address their weaknesses over many years to little avail. I know this because I meet them at their 360 feedback sessions somewhere mid-career where they say ‘yes, that always comes up as a weakness, I do try...’. This is usually a depressing conversation for both parties.

Recent thinking is that attending more to our strengths will reap greater benefit in terms of performance improvement. This is because when we are using our strengths work feels effortless, we are energised and confident, we are engaged and probably experience moments of flow. Feeling like this we are more able to be generous and patient with others, so the benefits flow onward. Strengths are an expression of highly developed mental pathways and neutral connections that take minimal effort to enact. Help your team members discover their true strengths and then find ways as a team to utilize everyone’s strengths to achieve the team task. Think of your team as an economy of strengths, and work out how to create extra value by trading your strengths.

Create commonality amongst team members

Teams are often made up of people with different skillsets and areas of expertise that tend to see the world, and the priorities for action within it, differently. This can lead to a great awareness of difference, and the differences can come to be seen as insurmountable. Yet at the same time there will be areas of commonality amongst team members, often in the areas of core values and central purpose.

A very productive way to access these commonalities is through the sharing of stories. When people are asked to share personal stories of their moments of pride at work, or moments of achievement or success, or the part of their job that means the most to them, they are expressing their values and sense of purpose in an engaging, passionate and easy to hear form. The listener will undoubtedly find that the story resonates with them, creating an emotional connection at the same time as they begin to see the person in a different light. In the best scenarios as people share their highlight stories a sense emerges in the room of ‘wow, these are great people I’m working with here, I’d better raise my game!’

Move from the habitual to the generative

Groups can get stuck in repeating dynamic patterns. When this happens listening declines as everyone believes they know what everyone else is saying – they’ve heard it all before. And so does the possibility of anything new happening. To break the patterns we need to move from rehearsed speech (which means exactly what it says, speech that has been thought or said so often it just tumbles out) to generative speech (which is the delightful sensation of hearing ourselves say something new).

To help the team make the shift you need to ask questions, or introduce activities that mean people need to think before they speak, that brings information into the common domain that hasn’t been heard before. Positively or appreciatively framed questions as suggested above are particularly good for this. So too are imagination based questions, or example ‘If we woke up tomorrow and we had solved this dilemma, how would we know, what would be different?’ ‘If we weren’t spending our time locked in this conversation, what might we be talking about?’ Or ‘as if’ questions ‘If we discuss this as if the customer was in the room with us, what will we be saying?’ Sometimes just getting people to all switch from their habitual seating pattern breaks old and creates new dynamics.

Create Future Aspirations

When teams suffer a crisis of motivation or morale it is often associated with a lack of hope. A lack of hope that things can get better, a lack of hope in the power and influence of the group or the leader, a lack of hope or belief in the possibility of achieving anything.

Hope and optimism are both great motivators and also key in team resilience. In hopeless situations we need to engender hopefulness. Appreciative Inquiry as an approach is particularly good at doing this as it first of all discovers the best of the current situation, unearths the hidden resources and strengths of the group, and then goes on to imagine future scenarios based on these very discoveries about what is possible. As people project themselves into optimistic futures clearly connected to the present, they begin to experience some hopefulness. This in turn engenders some motivation to start working towards those more aspirational scenarios of how things can be.

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we can help Top Teams and how we can help your organisation with Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

How Does Positive Organisational Behaviour Turn Into Positive Organisational Performance

Positive organisational scholarship researcher Kim Cameron reports that flourishing organisations, that is organisations that are success as well as being described as great places to work, exhibit three key cultural characteristics.

A strong interest in learning from positive deviance

All organisations have an interest in learning from negative deviance, that is, when things go wrong. Rather less have an interest in learning from positive deviance, when things go right. But they are missing a trick. We now know that very often the root causes of success are not just the polar opposite of the root causes of failure. Taking an active interest in learning from exceptionally good performance allows organisations to increase their ability to succeed.

The modelling and promotion of virtuous actions

There is still a strong organizational story that suggests that a successful organizational culture is hard, macho and dog-eat-dog with little time for sentiment. By contrast Cameron’s research has found that organisations that promote virtuous actions, by which he means things such as kindness, patience, humility, generosity and forgiveness reap the benefits in organizational performance. A moment’s thought suggests this makes sense as such an environment means people are likely to take more learning risks than in a blame orientated culture with a minimal toleration of mistakes or errors. Of course the learning process still has to be managed, but the recognition that people are human and that in any human system error is inevitable helps liberate learning behaviour and reduce blame avoidance and buck-passing.

A strong bias towards affirming the best in people and situations

Cameron found that his exceptional organisations had a real bias towards noticing and affirming the best in people. We might say they had developed skill with their appreciative capabilities as well as their critical ones. Being affirmed in your essential goodness as well as your particular strengths helps boost confidence and morale. It also affects motivation. People grow towards the best reflections of themselves. Reflecting back the best of people helps them attain their potential.

This collection of behaviour actively promotes two organizational processes that lead to improved performance

Upward virtuous circles of positive emotion and behaviour

When we see others displaying exceptional virtue, we are inspired to emulate them. People behave better in the company of the better behaved. The kind of culture described above contributes to a self-reinforcing virtuous circle of people feeling good, therefore being more inclined to do good things, therefore more likely to be observed by others behaving well, who in turn are more likely to be inspired to behave at their best, with colleagues, customers and suppliers. All these little bits of behaviour add up to a performance culture.

Social Capital

These three key organizational behaviours also contribute to the development of good social capital. Social capital describes the levels of trust and connection between departments or divisions in an organization. High levels of social capital promote good information flow and low-level decision-making and problem-solving, all of which contributes effectively to local and global performance.

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we can help with Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715