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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…