How Organisations Can Stop Falling Short of Their Values
Organisations often fall short of putting their stated values into practice. Here are some tips on how to cure that problem
How To Use Appreciative Inquiry Without A Formal 5D Cycle (1): Ask For Best Practice Stories
Do you want to get started using Appreciative Inquiry confidently with teams? A new Practical Appreciative Inquiry online training starts soon – click here to get the details and how to book Reading the excellent book Conversations Worth Having: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Fuel Productive and Meaningful Engagement by Jackie Stavros and Cheri Torres, I was
Social Silences: What Isn’t Being Talked About In Your Organisation?
This week I listened to a fascinating podcast interview with author and journalist Gillian Tett about her new book Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life. The book is about what we can learn if we take useful concepts and methods normally hidden away within the fairly obscure academic discipline of anthropology,
Why The Cynic On Your Team Is Your Best Friend In Managing Change
A while ago, a friend asked my advice about dealing with an ‘apathetic and cynical’ member of her management team. The team were tasked with driving through some sweeping changes in her Primary Care Trust (I probably need to explain to non-UK readers that this is part of the UK’s National Health Service). My friend
The IKEA Effect: How To Use It For Staff Engagement
A series of experiments at Harvard Business School by Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely, found that people value products more when they have put work into assembling them. In one experiment, participants each assembled an item of IKEA furniture and then were asked how much they would pay for it. Then a new
Emergent Principles of Appreciative Inquiry 2: The Enactment Principle
Traditionally, Appreciative Inquiry has had five guiding principles (the Constructionist, Poetic, Simultaneity, Anticipatory, and Positive principles as sent out by David Cooperrider in, for example, the Appreciative Inquiry Handbook). In recent years, new principles have started to emerge as Appreciative Inquiry consultants have refined their thinking in the light of practical experience. These are usually
How To Heal ‘Us And Them’ Rivalries
Ideas for eliminating ‘us and them’ thinking and damaging rivalries between teams and divisions within the same organisation. (Note: this article does not deal with worker/management mistrust, as the power relations involved add a whole other dimension, although some of the remedies proposed may still be useful in those situations.) Do you find yourself at
When to use Appreciative Inquiry – and when not to
Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is an attractive approach to change for many reasons; it generates results fast, it engages people, it liberates creativity, it moves away from ‘blame culture’, and – not least – it feels good to focus on the positive. Even so, AI requires a considerable investment of time and resources, and perhaps a
Business-friendly Appreciative Interview Format
If you’ve looked at the ‘traditional’ appreciative interview format set out in most books about Appreciative Inquiry, you might have decided it wasn’t quite something you could use in a work context. Too touchy-feely, you may have thought, or too focused on patting oneself on the back, something we Brits are rarely comfortable doing. A
Politics, brain science, and organisational change
Or: Why does everyone love Occupy Wall Street when they hated the English rioters? It’s not every day that something useful comes out of an online discussion, but in this case I think something has. During the recent riots in England, most of my Facebook contacts, who I had thought had a fairly liberal political
Appreciative Inquiry Principles: 5. The Positive Principle
Changing the way we work is not easy. It requires us to learn new ways of doing things and new ways of communicating with each other. At the same time, most people find change stressful. The more fundamental the change, the more stressful it potentially feels. The problem is that people cannot learn when they
Empathy is the only sure way to achieve peace
Inspired by an article in the Jewish Chronicle by Simon Baron-Cohen and Avi Machlis, I’ve been thinking about the need for empathy, and ways to enhance it. Baron-Cohen and Machlis define empathy as “the ability to imagine someone else’s thoughts and feelings”, and decries the apparent lack of this ability on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian