World Appreciative Inquiry Conference 2012

World Appreciative Inquiry Conference 2012, Ghent.


I attended the Conference and a pre-conference AI/Strengths Master Class with David Cooperrider in the two days preceding the conference. There are several webcasts from the Conference really worth viewing.



The first is the Conference Opening Keynote speech from Prof. Cooperrider which sets the scene for the three days that followed and also picks up a number of themes from his earlier masterclass, with almost 200 participants. In particular the need to find ways of 'scaling' strengths-based approaches to transformation in our cities, organisations and communities and the development of the appreciative models to be ever more generative in nature, i.e. far more than mere positive thinking and talking.


http://www.2012waic.com/webcast-opening-keynote/


The second webcast involves two fascinating examples of how 'business can be an agent of world benefit', another theme from within the Conference. One example involves an entrepreneur using digital design manufacture to reduce waste, speed production and scale the knowledge of the processes across the globe. The second example involves a more 'straightforward', if that's the right word, use of Appreciative Inquiry in an already highly successful service company in Belgium. The AI intervention was facilitated by David Cooperrider and the presentation demonstrates the power of using AI in organisations that seemingly had little need of improvement. The lesson was, transformation can take place when we are most capable, as well as when we are least able or poor in our performance.


http://www.2012waic.com/plenary-session-1/


The final webcast, by Dr. Diana Whitney takes us on a global journey of Appreciative Leadership at the Nexus of Appreciative Inquiry, Positive Psychology and the Strengths Movement. Dr Whitney is one of the thought-leaders in the AI world and again draws on the latest research and case studies to demonstrate how leadership has been influenced and shaped through the three pillars of this world-view, i.e. positive psychology, AI and strengths.

http://www.2012waic.com/webcast-plenary-session-3-dr-diana-whitney/


Taken together these webcasts offer some of the most uptodate thinking and practise in a field that is continuing to challenge the deficit, problem-centred 'improvement' paradigms in our organisations, services and cities. All of this offers ways for our hard-pressed organisations, particularly in the public sector, but not only those, to address the need for transformation from their generative and positive cores.    

Come and co-create the European Appreciative and Strengths-focused Network

Just a week before the World Appreciative Inquiry Conference in Ghent, a group of fellow AI practitioners is publishing this open letter to all appreciative and strengths-focused practitioners and our clients, inviting you to invest in the next stage of the development of the European network and its web home. 


A small group of us has been working for months since the Manchester Network meeting in November 2011 to develop ideas and proposals to create a stronger resource-base for the www.networkplace.eu home of AI in Europe and to deepen the influence of the stakeholders in what's known as the Begeistring Community. Now we feel is the right moment to seek this wider co-creation for our community, to improve its resilience, widen its membership and provide sustainable resources for a fully inter-active learning platform.    


Below you will find that invitation and I really commend you to take a moment to read it and visit the networkplace.eu website. Do also visit www.optimuminterventions.co.uk for more on AI and strengths-focused approaches to change and development. 

Invitation to be a Stakeholder in the European Begeistring Community

How about being a Stakeholder in the European Begeistring Community?

A European Network of Practitioners like you, working with Appreciative Inquiry and Other Strengths-Based Change Approaches.

A Network deeply committed to the relational way of working, high quality connections and learning opportunities.

Practitioners seeking to connect their best practices, combine diversity and co-create a vibrant landscape of events and resources within the European Spirit.

The European Begeistring Community offers co-operation and support through access to a vivid and active Network of Professionals and to an increasingly important reference point for Appreciative Inquiry.

*****

How about becoming a Co-creator of the Begeistring Network with its vision to make a huge difference in the world through actions and through sharing the curiosity to see what more there will be and can be?

Develop connections with other professionals across Europe to better serve your European clients.

Exchange and share best practices by working together.

Make connections with people in your own field of work.

Enrich your practice by taking part in Pan-European research or learning opportunities.

Build your strengths and resilience in your own life, work and career, family and friends or future situations.

Have your company visible and searchable by potential clients and academic bodies interested in speaking with AI practitioners.

Enjoy an active and growing web based learning platform offering accessibility, kinship, recognition, support, intelligence, materials, connections, opportunities.

Bring your passion and expertise as a Begeistring Network Stakeholder

To co-construct the Network …

Bring your passion for co-creating futures to translate the ideals of the Network into building an interactive learning community.

Bring your expertise on posting, editing and updating a web-based learning platform to keep vital information flowing to Network members.

Become part of this remarkable Network and enjoy its services and visibility with your sponsorship. Choose your sponsorship level at www.networkplace.eu.

Enjoy and co-create an active and growing web based learning platform offering accessibility, kinship, recognition, support, intelligence, materials, connections, and opportunities.

Your contribution through sponsorship and/or active participation in working with the web-based environment will help the community to move forward in collaboration and broadening the Begeistring landscape.

On a very practical matter there is a need to move www.networkplace.eu to a more collaborative and inclusive platform and to integrate the work we have started with the Grundtvig project on www.learningeurope.eu

If you are excited by the idea of co-constructing the future of the European Begeistring Community, do reply and say how you want to be involved.

We look forward to hearing from you

Best wishes,
On behalf of Network Advisory Group
Kees Ahaus, TNO Management Consultants, Netherlands
Anthoula Athanassiadou, Greece
Griet Bouwen, vzw Stebo, Belgium
Joep de Jong, Van Harte & Lingsma, Netherlands
Mille Duvander, Intersmil, Denmark
Mario Gastaldi, Brain Team Consulting, Italy
Klara Hejdukova, Systemic Institute, Czech Republic
Yianna Klissari, Greece
Leif Josefsson, Metaspace, Sweden
Helena Kettleborough, England
Peter Bach Lauritzen, Denmark
John Lodder, Balance Consultancy, Croatia
Steve Loraine, Optimum Interventions, England
Claire Lustig-Rochet, CLR Conseils, France
Johanna Nordström, MacMannBerg, Sweden
Anne Radford, AI Practitioner, England
Daniel Richardsson, Sweden
Ann Shacklady-Smith, England
David Shaked, Almond Insight, England
Harris Valassoglou, Serendity ltd, Greece
Karin van Kesteren, Netherland
Bert Verleysen, vzw Stebo, Belgium
Sven Sandström & Lisen Kebbe, Sweden
Bernard Tollec, Involve Consulting, France
Annet van de Wetering, TNO Consultants, Netherlands
Kaj Voetmann, Denmark

4-D The Cincinnati way

Shannon Polly writes in a new piece of the Positive Psychology News Daily about a large-scale Appreciative Inquiry 4-D process in Cincinnati - the Core Change project. Aside from being the usual interesting piece one finds in the PPND,  the article offers some insights into how 4-Ds is developing in one project.


The first noticeable aspect is the use of 4-Ds in a different layout to ones we might be familiar with, i.e.:

1. Discovering the best of what is and has been
2. Dreaming about the future
3. Designing the Future
4. Deploying that design

In the recent history of AI, the 4-D model (which is not the only framework, there are the 5-Ds and 4 and 5-I's - no one said it wasn't a flexible way to view the world!) has mostly ended with Destiny as the final 'D'. In even earlier versions of the approach, the final 'D' was Deliver, 'though this gradually fell into disuse due its implication of finality and an end to something, when in reality the destiny of an organisation or a community is always developing, re-learning and in some form of transition, whatever the changes that come about as a result of an AI activity. 

I found it interesting that a new term has entered the AI lexicon. Deploy can seem almost military, in its sense of deploying 'forces' (not that that's necessarily a bad thing), or in deploying resources - much closer to the organisational/community context perhaps.A little later in the piece the fourth 'D' is broadened into 'Deployment - Design into Action', which is really starting to draw me in as a new term with potential for use with several of our client organisations.

Another phrase that struck me was "Problems don’t get solved by talking about them as problems.” Peter Block, a consultant and author who spoke at the Summit, used this phrase, which reminds us that AI never denies problems exist or that they need to be solved. What it offers us though, even demands of us, is the need to balance those problems with the counter-weight of finding the good in systems, of stories about things working well, in seeing energy and inspiration in our worlds and the strengths in individuals. These attributes set problems in their true perspective - what we inquire into is fateful. What do we want to talk about more of and do more of?

A really helpful notion was that "Design needs an opposable mindset, the ability to hold different kinds of ideas simultaneously." When we work with AI we need to guard against the rush to "edit prematurely". If we do we miss the richness of everyone's contributions from the Dream phase of an Inquiry.Retaining the whole of our work carries more energy, ideas, passion and commitment longer into an AI process. Sure, at some point we need to do practical things like action plan, prioritise, find resources and so on - only do so with more of people's contributions in play and therefore, their engagement. And, as we learn from research that engagement, in work and community activities, provides satisfaction, happiness and greater productivity. 

Finally, this phrase caught my eye, "As the idea took shape (of having a website to express the diversity and connect the 52 neighbourhoods of Cincinnati), an even bigger one took its place: to have a subsequent appreciative inquiry summit to design the world’s first strengths-based city." Wow, now that's what I call a provocative proposition! 

Shannon Polly finishes her article saying, "It’s impossible to know what will come out of the Core Change Summit. When you magnify strengths there are endless possibilities." This is a project we should keep abreast of and make a contribution to within the world of appreciative and strengths-focused change.

  

http://positivepsychologynews.com/news/shannon-polly/2012031221407

It's Monday - make those meetings work better!

In a few hours, you will be starting your weekly round of 'good-finding', solution-focused, appreciative meetings; you will programme some quiet time for reflection and planning and look forward to recognising the contributions of others towards your success. Your meetings will run well, crisply chaired with collaborative outcomes (well, I hope so anyway). 

On the other hand, your week might pan out a little differently. In one sample of 65 CEOs reported by the Wall Street Journal and cited by the Drucker Exchange, executives spent roughly 18 hours of a 55-hour workweek in meetings, more than three hours on calls and five hours in business meals (!), on average, the Journal noted. “Working alone averaged just six hours weekly.”  

The Drucker Exchange website also reported that he found meetings to be big potential time-wasters. He also knew that they didn’t have to be that way. The key to successful meetings, in Drucker’s eyes, was to make sure that they became “work sessions rather than bull sessions.”

In The Effective Executive, Drucker put meetings into the following categories, and also offered some specific operating instructions for each:

1. “A meeting to prepare a statement, an announcement, or a press release. For this to be productive, one member has to prepare a draft beforehand.” So, no statements created by committee, at least not from scratch. 
2. “A meeting to make an announcement—for example, an organisational change. This meeting should be confined to the announcement and a discussion about it.” Limiting the scope to ensure the message is clear and can be properly conveyed outside of the meeting need not limit the necessary debate and consultation, rather it ensures they happen with the key message crystal clear.  
3. “A meeting in which one member reports. Nothing but the report should be discussed.” We know what happens when these single-issue meetings broaden out to include "just another issue", don't we? 
4. “A meeting in which several or all members report. Either there should be no discussion at all or the discussion should be limited to questions for clarification.” That's a tough one. yet, how often have these sessions burned hours of time unnecessarily, particularly if clarification becomes debate which turns into arguments of position-taking?  
5.  “A meeting to inform the convening executive. The executive should listen and ask questions.”
6.  “A meeting whose only function is to allow the participants to be in the executive’s presence. . . . .There is no way to make these meetings productive. They are the penalties of rank.”

From there, good executives “sum up and adjourn”—and then they follow up. Alfred Sloan of General Motors always wrote up a summary of the main points and the conclusions reached at a meeting and sent a copy to everyone who’d been present. Said Drucker: “It was through these memos—each a small masterpiece—that Sloan made himself into an outstandingly effective executive.”

Some of the items in the list might appear to be rather strict, dogmatic even - perhaps they were intended that way, to challenge current practice and generate a shift of behaviour. Whether dogmatic or simply properly challenging, Drucker's views are food for thought at a time when we so many colleagues have so much to do with so little resource - the most precious of which is time!

Have an achieving week.

North-South divide - or is it more complex than that?

This Guardian report http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/10/essex-jaywick-youth-unemployment-hotspot is a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece about the growing problem of unemployment for young people. The 'twist' in this story, if there is one, is the location of this, the Country's youth-unemployment 'high-spot', in percentage terms at least. It's not in the north of England or in the inner part of one of our core cities. No, it's in an area of Clacton-on-Sea in Essex. To a degree though, the location is immaterial. Stories like this can be as common in rural market towns as they are in larger population centres.


The article concentrates in an understated way on the experience of being workless and not in education, having little focus for each day, being geographically, economically and socially isolated, and so on. The article also touches on the long-term effects youth unemployment between 16-24 has on the level of wages young people can expect to receive later in life. The impact is far from negligible, so even when employment can be secured, the rewards can be lower across many years. 


This dreadful waste of talent and energy when allied to, or as a consequence of, the rapid and incoherent scrapping of essential public/vol/com programmes and projects, will take a generation to address. It seems though that this is not the generation in which that will take place in a concerted and consistent manner. 


I cannot be alone in spotting yet another apparent attention-diversion to this real and deep problem in society, when today the Coalition announced that bonuses in the public sector are to be thoroughly investigated. I have little time for bonuses being paid to public servants, but evidence suggests that in a number of cases, mainly in the civil service and not local government for instance, they were instigated to make up for low pay rises and to avoid long-term costs being consolidated into salaries and thus pension entitlements. Those agreements, we can be sure, will be an inconvenient truth during this investigation. As inconvenient a truth as the bonuses paid to bankers in the publicly owned banks - or maybe this is the Trojan horse to finally nail the bonuses of those 'public servants'!