Game Theory and its application in our organisations

At The Open Channel we are open to new technologies and ways of communicating and learning. The Gametrainers web site is a good practical resource for trainers and facilitators and also a catalyst for creative thinking for all learning and development practitioners. 


Most people are more creative when they are having fun, and all organisations need creative thinking to support positive change. Team meetings for example can be (but aren't always) boring, repetitive and stifling. There are though some practical and productive ways to generate deeper engagement and new ideas. How about:

• Hold the front page
• Ideas tennis
• Resource Auction
• Information mining
• Plane Speaking
• Homepage Hotspots
• Balloon Debate
• Solutions Cycle

Can you afford NOT to try these innovative and playful methods to generate insights, ideas and progress?

http://www.thegametrainers.com/apps/blog

A call for more sustainable growth and fairer distribution

The 2020 Public Services Trust, a part of the RSA, has launched a report called Business, Society and Public Services which calls for a more sustainable approach to economic growth and a fairer process for distributing wealth so that we can invest in public services over the longer term. The widening gap between rich and poor is a cost on our collective responsibilities and we need a different way and a new commitment to investing in our social and public institutions


http://2020psh.org/?p=1023


At the same time, Common Dreams highlights one of the cases where sustainability and fair distribution are an anathema!


The Common Dreams website is certainly one that people with a particular world view might choose not pay much attention to all that often. Once again though it has highlighted the dreadful risks that large ‘casino’ banks take – and in the end their (failed) risks hit every single person, e.g. the £60b the UK government used to bail-out just two banks in 2008-09 and the cuts in public services we are now seeing as a result of that economy-saving move (lest we forget. 


Common Dreams tells us “Doing God’s work” as JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon calls it - that is, betting huge sums of money with depositor funds knowing that you are too big to fail and can count on taxpayers riding to your rescue if your avarice threatens to take the country down — has lost some of its luster. The jewels in Dimon’s crown sparkle with a little less grandiosity than a few days ago, when he ridiculed Paul Volcker’s ideas for keeping Wall Street honest as “infantile.”” His London traders’ £2b losses have cost JPM big money and one of his senior players’ careers. 


Read more about what these ‘masters of the universe’, as Tom Woolf called them in ‘Bonfire of the Vanities,’ are up to. Remember, what they do on Wall Street, eventually impacts on us.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/17

   

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