mastering positive change

Business901 Podcast Transcription

Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

Mastering Positive Change

Copyright Business901

Mastering Positive Change Guest was Sara Lewis

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http://business901.com/blog1/mastering-positive-change/





Sarah Lewis is the Managing Director of Appreciating Change, a psychological change consultancy focused on helping leaders and managers achieve positive change in their organizations. Appreciating Change specializes in using rapid response change methodologies. With over 25 years’ experience of helping individuals and

organizations change, she regularly presents at National Conferences and publishes in magazines.

Appreciating Change is a business psychology consultancy specializing in helping organizations to achieve sustainable change. Working closely with the client to ensure partnership and ownership, we bring expertise in psychology and in social change methodologies such as Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space and World Café. All of these approaches help reduce resistance to change and the need to create ‘buy-in’, rather people co-create the change of which they will be part. Recent clients include: Aston Business School, Kronos, DeBeers, Vectoraerospace and Buckingham County Council. This year we have begun offering a series of Masterclass workshops to give people the chance to learn directly from Sarah's experience in the field of Positive Psychology and particularly the use of Appreciative Inquiry in the workplace. These run every 3 months and alternate between a Masterclass

aimed at fellow practitioners, which is tailored to those who have some experience and understanding of the theory behind organizational change already, and a Masterclass aimed at leaders in organizations which is more aimed at helping them use this learning in their management of the organization.





Joe Dager: Welcome, everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of "Business901" podcast. With me today is Sarah Lewis. She's the managing director of Appreciating Change, a psychological change consultancy focused on helping leaders and managers achieve positive change in their organizations. Her most recent book is "Positive Psychology at Work," and the work that I am most familiar with is the book "Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management." Sarah, I would like to welcome you. I have to add

"AI for Change Management" in such a short time has become one of my most referenced books. Could you give me a short introduction to the book and yourself?

Sarah Lewis: I'd be delighted to. Thank you, Joe. The book is a distillation really of 10 or more years of working with appreciative inquiry and training people to use this approach, realizing that there were certain things that people asked time and time again and were interested in understanding more about. I thought it would be a good idea to try to put it all down in writing to make it accessible to people. I was very lucky to be helped by my colleagues Jonathan and Stefan who coauthored the book with me.

For myself, I've been working in an appreciative way based on appreciative inquiry approaches from about 1993, when I was introduced to this way of working through an institute here. It has just transformed my practice and also actually my experience of the world. It's a very powerful approach I find.

Joe: Well, what prompted your new book, "Positive Psychology

at Work"? Does it cover a broader spectrum of AI or does it zero down into it?

Sarah: They're two separate strands. Appreciative inquiry, as you will know from your reading, was developed by David Cooperrider in the States, from Case Western University through his work there. Recently, separately and in the psychology world,





Martin Seligman, 10 or 12 years ago now, started becoming interested in what's the difference between naught and plus five, as it were, in human flourishing, human wellbeing, happiness, lives well lived. What's the difference between being OK and really thriving?

Psychology has spent a lot of time looking at the difference between minus five and zero, so examining mental ill health,

failure to thrive, unhappy people and different times. We've learned a lot about how to get people back to a good enough point. But Martin Seligman started becoming interested in what makes people exceptional and can we learn from that?

So it seemed to me that there was a real match between these two approaches and that almost appreciative inquiry was the organizational arm of positive psychology. I wanted to explore what happens if you bring these two approaches together.

What does it mean for leaders and managers in organizations?

How can they benefit from this exciting research in this area of positive psychology in a practical and pragmatic way, so that they can make a difference in their own organizations?

Joe: Why is positive psychology important to an organization?

Sarah: Essentially, organizations spend a lot of time focusing on what goes wrong in an attempt to prevent it from happening again. Very reasonable, clearly we need to learn from mistakes and failures and find out how to prevent them reoccurring. The issue is that if you study mistakes, failures and things that aren't working, what you learn about is them. What you don't necessarily learn about is what makes success.

One of the things we're realizing is that if you study your organization from a perspective of when are people working at their best, what are the most successful things that we're doing? When do people feel really great here? What engages people





about their work? What do people find motivating, what are the values that hold us together? These kinds of things you learn about the factors for success.

Interestingly, some of the research that's been done, again, by an American academic Ken Cameron, who has studied the best of the organizations. Those that are very productive, very profitable and great places to work he calls flourishing organizations.

It's clear that they do thing qualitatively differently to other organizations. It's not just more of the same. They do things differently.

Joe: In doing things differently, I'm going to assume from the conversation, is taking more of a positive approach, right?

Sarah: Well, there are three key elements. One definitely is this positive approach. We call that an affirmative bias. Within the organization they're always looking to affirm the best of what they do, to affirm that the strengths, skills and abilities that their

people bring, to look to the best of what they're able to do and build on that. Also, they have a tendency to be interested in the exceptionally good, like the positive deviance in the organization. So rather than just ignoring when someone does better than everyone else as some strange anomaly -- "Well, that's just so-and-so or that's just so-and-so's team, they just got lucky," -- they're much more interested to find out what happened.

"Well, what is she doing in her department that's allowing her to get these particularly good results? Can we learn from the best of our range of activities?"

So they put in much energy into that as they do to examining where things might be not quite up to scratch. And then the third thing and this is very interesting I think, and very much relates to some other research in positive psychology about emotions.





So something else they found out about the most flourishing organizations is that they demonstrate a lot of what you might call "the virtues." Like compassion, and forgiveness, and interest, and support, and humility. And just words that aren't always associated with organizational life.

Joe: I find that quite interesting, because it really is a deeper dive from Appreciative Inquiry.

Sarah: Yes, absolutely. Appreciative Inquiry, one of the main principles that it's built on is this principle of positivity, which essentially says that, "change takes energy." And energy that comes from positive emotions is much more sustainable as a support for change than the energy that comes from what you might call negative emotions. Particularly fear is often used in organizations to try to promote change. Fear, anger those sorts of emotions are important. They produce a short burst of energy to change something. Whereas things like hope, optimism, passion, excitement, joy, or interest, these emotions, these

positive emotions, create a much more sustainable movement forward for change.

So Appreciative Inquiry has always recognized this importance of positive emotions to help organizations, and as part of organizational life, particularly around change. And the more research that is done into positive emotions through the positive psychology field, the more apparent it becomes what an asset that are, both to us in our own lives, and to organizations.

The huge difference it makes. You may have come across Shawn

Achor's work. He's done some fantastic broadcasts on TED and so on, who's really coined it. And said, "You know what we're realizing now? Is that happiness causes success. Not success causes happiness. That when we're able to develop more positive emotional states for ourselves as individuals and in our organizations, then we do better." That is very exciting I think.





Joe: Well I think it is. But to frame that and to look at it from another context, I grew up in world of fixing problems. I went out and looked for problems to fix. Boy, that's a change for me. I'm thinking as I observe something, when I'm listening to someone talking, and I'm looking for problems. I'm looking how I can help someone. What you're saying, I shouldn't be looking for the problems. I should be helping someone expand on the positives. But it's easy to say it. It's difficult to do, I think.

Sarah: It's interesting. You're absolutely right. No one's saying it's an either/or kind of situation. We still need to continue to solve problems, and we solve problems extremely well. As organisms, and biological organisms, human beings are very good problem solvers. It stands us in good stead. But sometimes we try to apply that skill where it doesn't produce the goods, particularly in social situations. So working with teams, perhaps people who have fallen into conflict. That kind of thing. Problem solving that doesn't always move us forward. So there are two elements that I want to sort of highlight here.

One is that I think David Cooperrider came up with a fantastic expression when he said in one of his writings that, "Every problem is the expression of a frustrated dream. If we didn't have a sense of how things could be, we wouldn't know that anything was wrong." Which I think is a brilliant insight.

Clearly, when we're talking about a problem, we're actually also expressing our sense that things could or should be different. Part of what Appreciative Inquiry does is it says, "Well, if talking about

this, whatever it is, as a problem, isn't solving it, isn't moving it forward, why don't we talk about the other end of that equation. Start imagining how things could be if we build upon the best of what we do have.

"If we focused on what is working around this problem area. Built more that and grew more of that. How might the world be? That





has a very liberating and shifting effect for a group of people in various ways."

The other point that you raised I think is very important, is about how we do train our brains. And evolutionary speaking, it's important for us to spot danger, problems, things that aren't working. So we're very oriented towards doing that.

Our work life encourages us to do that even more. Particularly people, quality inspectors, accountants, people like this, whose whole life is made up of trying to spot what's going wrong. That part of their brain becomes very well developed.

What we don't necessarily spend so much time is developing the appreciative abilities. So our critical abilities tend to be very well developed by the time we're sort of in adulthood. But our appreciative abilities, our appreciative eyes, and ears, and judgment, and intelligence, tend to be underdeveloped.

Therefore, for a lot of people, it does feel very odd. These parts of

their brain are not as well developed. They're not as skilled at doing this.

Joe: You talk about fast and efficient when you talk about positive change and appreciative inquiry. What makes it fast and efficient?

Sarah: That's a very good question. To understand that we have to contrast it with the dominant model of change, this is the idea that change is a huge plan. In most people's minds when they're thinking about organization or change it's about a small group get

together, they decide what the strategy is, they maybe gather some data as well, and they pull together a plan or perhaps create a vision, that kind of thing, and then they go out to the rest of the organization and try to sell their vision of the future and their understanding of the best way to get there to everybody else in the organization. That takes a huge amount of





time because they're pushing their ideas into the rest of the organization and you'll be familiar with the expression we've got to get buy-in. Obviously if they're trying to get someone to buy that must mean they're selling. The other one is we're going to meet resistance here. People don't like change, we're going to meet resistance. You hear all that. That's our default normal way of dealing with change.

What appreciative inquiry and the other transformational, collaborative approaches to change do is turn all of that on its head and they say let's start with the large group, let's start with everyone who's going to be part of this change one way or another, everyone who's going to be affected by this as best we can. The whole system, but you can't always get quite the whole system.

As best we can the whole system that's part of whatever it is we're talking about and let's together first of all understand what we've got to build on, which is the discovery part of the

appreciative inquiry process, and then imagine using that, building on that, how we want our organization to be, which is the dream part of the AI process. Then realize how we've got to be now to move in that direction, which is the design part.

Then the delivering part is what are we going to go away after our congress together today and do to make this happen. What you get is a lot of people co-creating both an understanding of the situation and also some ideas for what the future could hold and some shared clarity, some shared common ground about

how things need to be different now to help move towards a good future.

People are getting by overcoming resistance and all of that because people's voices have been present in the process of creation so they own it. It's the secret of participation, really, done in a particular way. Because of the way appreciative inquiry





works, very much creating positive emotion and a positive pull towards the future, people are motivated to go away and do things to make these futures happen.

In that sense it's very fast and it's very effective.

Joe: Could you touch upon the SOAR framework instead of using the SWOT analysis. That's a positive approach of looking at the present situation.

Sarah: SOAR was developed by Jackie Stavros and others as a way to apply appreciative inquiry to the strategic challenge. Generally speaking, in appreciative inquiry we don't go investigating, for instance in this context, threats and weaknesses because the more we talk about them the bigger they get in our minds, as it were, and if we can't do anything about them it just depresses everybody. If we work on what are our strengths, what are the opportunities, what aspirations do we have for the organization, building on those, and how do we know if we're

making progress, i.e. results, people are able to stay in a much more positive frame. Remembering always that as we said before it's not that we're ignoring difficult things it's that we're talking about them differently and therefore are allowing different things to happen.

I've used SOAR with a few different organizations and it works really well. If there's an issue that has to come up of course it will come up and then we work within the context of that conversation to try and reframe that in a way that is going to help us do something with it, to reframe it in a positive way.

Which is a bit about what you were saying when you were listening in your meetings developing that ability to think where is the positive in all of this?

What can I ask that will allow people to see that there is something good here? For instance, if someone's talking about a weakness or a threat it might be what do we have that's going to





help us with that? What do we have that might ameliorate that? If we thought about this as an opportunity rather than a weakness how would we be acting differently?

It's just something about moving away from the standard conversation where you run into these buffers of depressing conversation.

Joe: We talk especially in Lean terms you always hear the five whys. Why, why, why and stuff. Is there an alternative in positive psychology to the five whys?

Sarah: Again I would say there's nothing wrong with the five whys if you're in a rational, analytical, logical problem-solving place and you get to a root cause. If you're dealing with an engineering problem, that may be very appropriate. The challenge arises when people try to take that way of thinking into something like a social situation, because people are, as we know, very emotional and creative entities. We're not just

rational, logical thinkers. We also have an emotional life, an imaginative life, an interior life, a social life, all sorts of things.

We are very capable of cutting off our noses to spite our face, putting our emotions before our logical and rational analysis. When it's all very emotion-free, and it's nothing to do with relationships particularly and it's a mechanical problem, then I think the five Y's probably works extremely well.

It's when you take that and try and apply that to something like a team not functioning terribly well or a relationship not functioning terribly well, or low morale in an organization, it just doesn't tend to produce useful answers.

Joe: I have to mention that Derek Lusk was talking to me about AI on Twitter. Appreciative inquiry is his dissertation topic that he's working on. I asked him what question he would have of you. He said that appreciative inquiry seeks to change norms,





values, policies, ideals. He wanted to know how AI is affected by an increasingly diverse employee population; if that's changing the way we use AI.

Sarah: It's interesting. First of all, I think appreciative inquiry is incredibly scalable. So he's absolutely right. In the broadest terms when you want to use it at an organizational level, those are very much the cultural things that you're trying to change.

You can also use it at a team level and you can use it in coaching. But to go back to your key question, the diversity of the workforce is absolutely what appreciative inquiry thrives on. Appreciative inquiry regards the organization as a social constructed phenomenon, i.e. it is constructed by the people in the organization.

The patterns of relationship, conversation and interaction that people exhibit in the organization are really what make it an organization, our patterns of relationships. I sometimes say that we talk our organization into existence every day by the way we

behave with each other.

We're looking for how to better help the organization best respond to the changes in the environment, to spot the opportunities that are coming up for the organization to grow, to respond to changes in the organization that might threaten its survival and so on. The more diversity we have in terms of different people's understandings of the world, perceptions of the world, experiences of the world, conceptions of the future and so on, the more possibility, the more resource we have within the

system for it to find a useful way forward.

So diversity is actually a real asset for appreciative enquiry and what we have to do with that of course is create sufficient commonality amongst the people who are part of the system that they are able to move forward together. And commonality is not the same as consensus.





People don't have to have exactly the same views and opinions and share exactly the same things. There has to be sufficient commonality, as I sometimes say, to allow for conjoint action, i.e., action that is reasonably coordinated with other people.

Again this can stand in contrast to other ways of working with organizations that look to eliminate diversity and wants consensus and there is one true path, there is only way to think

about, talk about, act within our organization. They do run into more difficulties when they need to adapt because it's hard for people who have alternatives to find a voice in those organizations.

When we work with appreciative enquiry we are interested in all voices because we don't know where possibilities that may help the organization find a good use for productive way forward. We don't know where those possibilities might lie.

Joe: I think what appreciative enquiry lends itself to is more of

that designer type look. It looks at a more a holistic solution, looking at the system as a whole and that you don't necessarily just draw out different solutions, you keep them and you evolve to a solution, rather than pick a solution and lead with it. Is that fair to say that?

Sarah: Oh, absolutely, because it's all about this kind of co-creation. So people are coming together to co-create ways forward and the resources that are used with appreciative enquiry are to do with imagination and possibility and past experience and the diversity of skills and knowledge that people in the

organization have. So you want to get a good range of possibilities so you can start finding good solutions and good ways forward.

Joe: In your experience, what are the main problems leaders run into when trying to achieve change like this?





Sarah: That's a very good question, because leaders do have to understand their organization, their role in the organization and change differently to get the best out of these approaches. So first of all they have to understand that the organization is a living social system and that they can't control it in that sense. Its self-organizing, it's made up of individuals who are essentially free agents that may be on the payroll etc, etc. So the illusion that the leader controls the organization is one thing they have to

give up. Another one they have to give up is the idea that they know everything, that they actually understand the organization better than anybody else because they are at the top of the structure. That's not necessarily the case either. That's an illusion that they need to give up to be able to give suitable credence to other people's account of how the organization is.

So there are lots of things about understanding an organization differently. The leader in an appreciative enquiry kind of approach is one amongst many in a privileged position. So they are one voice amongst many, they are able to set some of the context. They have particular privileges so they can say we have limited budget for whatever we come up with, or it needs to be in these kinds of broad parameters.

But what they are doing is they are, in an appreciative way, is they are calling on the collective intelligence of the organization. This is where it starts to become hugely liberating for leaders. There is two things, one is they don't have to work it out all themselves. There are however many brains that are in the organization who can apply themselves to the challenge with as

much information as each of them have.

Joe: Well, you lead to a very good point. I forget which book I was listening to, the person said is that you are not the smartest person in the room; the room is the smartest person.





Sarah: Well, obviously they said that. In much fewer words, that's pretty much the point I was trying to make. So for the leader, they don't have to solve it all, and they don't have to have all the answers. That's the same thing really. But the main thing is they don't have to have the answer. What they have to have faith in is the fact that the smart room, the room as a whole, the system will find a way forward, if given the right conditions.

Joe: One of the things I used in a recent workshop that I got for your book, AI for Change Management, was using reflecting teams. Could you describe that a little bit to me and expand on it a little?

Sarah: There is different ways of using reflecting teams. What it does is it puts the team that's in the reflecting space into what I would call listening position. Often this is done in what they call a goldfish bowl process. Some people will be in a group talking and other people will be around them listening. You might have the senior team who are discussing their understanding of the

situation, the broader situation that the organization is responding to, and some of their initial thoughts at the moment about how the organization might act. They might have a selection of people from around the organization who are listening. The people outside don't have to respond to anything that they hear the senior managers say, they are just there to listen. After a while you would ask the audience, what has been the audience to get into small groups and give them some questions to consider, what did they found most helpful about, what their board have got to say, and what have they noticed

about what they are attending to, what other things do they think are important for the board to attend to in its decisions and, I don't know, whatever, some questions.

Then the board members can either be situated each in a group, or just wander around from one group to another. But again they are not there to have to answer to anything that they hear. When





people are put in a position where they don't have to respond to what's being said, they hear so much more because they don't have to have a defense, have an answer, have a comeback, have a rationale to bring to something that somebody has said.

They can just let it sort of sink in a bit more and hear things that they don't hear when they are in that normal conversational space.

Joe: I think that's the interesting part that I found out about it is that how much more you hear when you are not sitting there trying to determine your response.

Sarah: Absolutely. The hearing sinks in deeper, because you can hear it. It has more impact. Something that somebody would have rejected out of hand if they had had to defend it, they are able to allow it enough room to have influence.

Joe: In your book, you discuss Open Space and World Cafe. Could you just briefly describe the two methods.

Sarah: Yes. I'll start with Open Space, which is again a very powerful methodology that I use more and more with groups where I can. Essentially it's a way of allowing a group to set their own agenda around a topic for what are the important things that need to be spoken about, discussed in some way and then just trying to structure for doing that. So very broadly it would need to be some business critical issue that needs discussion and maybe decision making, and then you bring the system to that issue that are relevant to it. And after some preliminaries you essentially ask everybody who is there to put forward what they think needs talking about, what the questions are, what they wanted to discuss, what options they want to explore or whatever. Then you can start the rest of the day from that.

So, you'd have a number of rooms, and you'd allocate a number of discussions to each of the rooms. The person who's raised the





topic is the host for that discussion. Then, people attend the discussions that they're interested in.

This is just so powerful, compared to many day long meetings I have been asked to facilitate, where basically, we have an agenda and it starts at nine and it finishes at five and everyone has to attend to every item, whether they're interested in it or not, whether it's relevant to them or not.

When people are allowed to go where they are interested, and where they are connected to the topic, they feel connected to the topic, they just have, it's just, again, it's so much more faster and more effective.

Joe: Before we go into World Cafe, can you use Open Space internally within an organization? People could gather and have, just a block of time that they could attend the meetings that they felt important to them. I mean, that sounds like a facilitated thing at a conference, or things like that, but can that really work

within an organization?

Sarah: I can't say I've heard of it. But I see no reason why it shouldn't, why one shouldn't be able to develop an organization that works much more on Open Space principles for its meetings and discussions. I have to say, one of the great benefits of not being part of a larger organization is I don't spend a lot of time in meetings, except when we're there because people want to talk about whatever it is I'm there for, if you see what I mean.

Joe: Sure, sure.

Sarah: So, I don't have to sit through those interminable meetings, where I'm just waiting to get to my item. We know that hours and hours of people's time can be wasted when they're in meetings, not sure why they're there, not sure what they're supposed to be contributing or taking away. But because someone's told them they have to be there.





Joe: Go on and explain the World Cafe a little bit.

Sarah: World Cafe, I think, is a methodology that's really good for very exploratory conversations. Essentially, all of these are ways of people having conversations in conversational group size, simultaneously, so you can 20, 50, and 100 people, but only working groups of six or 8. Then, have those conversations connected. In World Cafe, people start at cafe tables. The idea is

that people talk to each other in a much more relaxed way when they're in a more relaxed atmosphere. It was a bit of intent to recreate a cafe atmosphere.

There's different ways you can do it. But essentially, let's just say you have different questions on different tables around the key topic, whatever that might be. And I start off at table A, and we have a discussion there around the question on that table. And then, one person stays at that table, after about 40 minutes or an hour, and then, the rest of us move off to a different table to address a different question.

You have the continuity around the particular question over two or three rounds, maintained by the person who stays at the table. But lots of connectivity as different people disperse to different tables, if you can see this.

It's difficult to explain it just in the imagination, but different people disbursed to different tables and join in the conversation there. So the person that has remained from the previous round will bring everybody up to speed on where we've got to, what's been mentioned so far in relation in this question. Then just start

another discussion.

Again, it's a way of having lots of things happening simultaneously and people being able to connect to two or three different questions that interest them during the course of the afternoon or the day.





Joe: I think there were two that were very interesting concepts. Have you continued to expand on them? Are you still using them, those two concepts?

Sarah: Definitely I still use them. Increasingly for me, I suppose, appreciative inquiry is the overarching approach, methodology, philosophy or way of life, to be honest, for me now. When I'm designing interventions for organizations to help them

move forward in whatever particular area it is, that's my overarching frame. Within that, I may well bring in World Cafe and Open Space as part of the process of appreciative inquiry.

I've also expanded it into manufacturing organizations particularly. There's a process called SimuReal, which is again a large system and much more similar to the lean type thing, but again, socially organized.

It's a system where you bring the whole system into the room. Then you simulate the process in the organization. With

manufacturing organizations particularly that tend to be very geographically disbursed, so they're over big sites. Secondly, people are very bound to their bit of the process.

Being away from your workbench is regarded with suspicion because they want people on the line or on the bench. So people don't understand what impact their action has further down the line. It's known as the silo mentality. I'm sure you've heard the expression.

If you're able to get the whole system in a room, then you can run a simulation, over two or three months, of something like an order going through the system. With people making the decisions that they do in their own context, that looks sensible and seem to solve a problem.

Someone might say, "Well, we haven't got quite the right number of bits for this order that's coming through of ZY, but I know that





AB will fit just as well as ZY. So let's take a couple of these ABs and put them in the box, and I'll write it up afterward."

In no time at all, nobody knows where anything is, nothing is where it is supposed to be. The computer is sending out messages. The ERP system is sending out messages that no one can fulfill. I find that works really well as well.

Anything where you get the whole system together so that they can see what they're doing, it's just tremendously powerful.

Joe: It sounds very interesting. It sounds like a good thing for me to do Monday at a meeting I'm going to.

Sarah: It takes a bit of setting up, I have to say.

Joe: How do you typically introduce AI or start an engagement with someone?

Sarah: This, again, is one of the reasons why I wrote the book because it's a question that gets asked so often. I guess there are a couple of principles. One is you always have to start where your organization is at. People rarely, although increasingly, rarely come saying. "What we want is an appreciative inquiry intervention," or, "What we want is strengths based way of working." They usually come saying, "We've got this problem. Can you help us?" that's your invitation to start having a discussion about tell me how life will be when this problem is solved or how things would be if you didn't have this problem or what is it that you actually want more of? I can see you want less of whatever the problem is. What would you like more of?

That's a way of starting to get to talk about it. You don't necessarily have to say what we're doing is appreciative inquiry. You just start working with them in an appreciative way. Then how much of the software, as it were, that you explain to the people you're working with depends on what feels appropriate.





Some of the language is not easy for people if they've never come across it before. Somebody very wise said, "If you want to be able to work with people you have to be sufficiently similar not to be frightening, but sufficiently different to be able to add value." I think that's the balance you're always trying to find when you're negotiating a new piece of work with someone.

If their whole language is around the organization as a machine

and problems and error and they've never heard the word passion or excitement in an organizational context and you come in talking about what gives life to the organization and positive core and an appreciation you may be too alien for them to be able to think that you can add any value.

You have to moderate how you join with the organization so that, as I say, you seem sufficiently familiar and yet sufficiently different. Does that help?

Joe: I think that was brilliant. When we go through these things

we always think that we're going to be the change agent, we jump into it and everything. About 10 minutes into it you look at all these glassy eyes looking at you. It's really starting with the current state. Your journey of a mile starts with one step.

Sarah: They also already have a solution in mind. This is part of the issue. They'll come to you saying, "Can you help us?" and then they say, "What we're thinking we need is..." so you need to start with that. I've found organizations say we're going to issue a survey of something. OK, well tell me a bit about the survey. I wonder if we can just add a couple more questions in there.

You're not dismissing what they've already done but you're beginning to make it a little bit more appreciative. Wouldn't it be good if we asked people a couple of questions about what they enjoy about working here, what they think are working? Typically the whole survey will be about what's wrong with the organization.





You've got lots of ways of just starting to bring the appreciative parts in and then building on it from there.

Joe: You run a master class workshop every three months. Could you tell me about it?

Sarah: Yes. We just started doing that this year so we ran the first one specifically for external change agents, as it were; Consultants, facilitators, trainers, that sort of thing. What I try to do is for them to bring together some of the most recent research and leaning in this area and we play around with how would you introduce this into an organization through workshops yourself? It's really training the trainers I suppose, up-skilling people who do that sort of thing. Next week we'll be running a similar kind of workshop but aimed directly at leaders and managers which will be much more about how can you use this in your organizations? Here are some of the key findings, some of the research, some of the supporting evidence around the difference, some of the key elements of this area.

Positivity, which we talked about; feeling good, good emotions, understanding people's strengths, what distinguishes flourishing organizations, and appreciative inquiry as a methodology for bringing all of these things together in your organization. It'll be much more oriented around how do you do this in little ways. What can you do within your sphere of influence as the leader or manager to start bringing some of these things into your work area.

For some people that might be big, they might say I think I'm

going to go away and think about addressing this organizational challenge from a more appreciative perspective. Someone else might be a much smaller thing like we really could use running our meetings slightly different. I run a team and we always start with problems and maybe we should start with celebrating a few successes that have happened since the last time we met and





taking time out to notice where people are doing well and what's going well.

Joe: If you had three pieces of advice for leaders for achieving the fast, effective, sustainable change what would they be?

Sarah: I think one would be you don't have to do it all alone. Draw on the collective intelligence of your organization. They want to survive as much as you do, they want to help. There may be some issues in the way they've been treated in the past but it's as important to them as it is to you that this organization continues to do well. One would be don't feel you have to do it all alone. The second would be, humans have evolved in such a way that they need more carrot than stick to be at their best. Because we over-weigh negative things and under-weigh positive things, we actually need three times as many good experiences as negative experiences to start to enter the enchanted place of creativity, connectivity, generativity, synchronicity and all the good things that help organizations to move much faster and

much more efficiently.

Yes, you need to obviously keep a minimum line on things. But what most organizations need a lot more of is the good stuff pumped into them, so that positivity thing.

I think the third piece of advice, which is a much more generic one, is it's becoming increasingly clear that the leaders who are able to have the most positive impact in their organizations, whatever their style may be, the key thing is this thing about authentic leadership. Part of authentic leadership is being open

and transparent in -- that's the other thing -- a managed way.

I remember some of the London Business School people said that after all their analysis, the art of leadership boiled downed to five words, which was, "Be yourself more with skill." All of those words are important, things like doing difficult things and asking for forgiveness, being humble about the fact that this is not doing





it on your own. Everybody here has contributed to what we've achieved this year. Those old-fashioned in a way is being grateful.

Everybody who comes to your organization helps to create it does something that moves it forward. There's something about allowing that side of yourself to come through to people, because people do respond and emotions are very contagious, virtuous

circles.

If we see people being heroic, we're more inclined to be a little bit more heroic ourselves the next time the opportunity arises. If someone is helpful, we see someone being helpful or someone is helpful to us, we're more likely to do it to somebody else.

You can set off these virtuous circles of very positive interactions, which just have not escalating, but the virtuous circle gets bigger and bigger benefits in terms of performance and productivity in the end.

Joe: Is there something you would like to add about this topic that I didn't ask?

Sarah: I hope what's come through is that I think we're at a very exciting time, where we're beginning to really make a shift from understanding the organization as something resembling a machine, that people need to be coerced into being part of, to understanding the organization as a social construction that people need to be affirmed for being part of. And that what is fantastic as far as I am concerned is, I think there is a lot of ethics to do with working with organizations because you interfere with people's lives and you need to I think, be very careful about what you are doing and give it a good thought about the impact, the interventions you are offering are going to have on the quality of life of the people who are going to be affected.





What's really good news about these ways of working is that introducing more positive emotion into organizations and more positivity, helping them understand what people's strengths are and how to work with them, helping them to appreciate what people bring to the situation, not only is it good for organization but it is good for individuals when we are able to experience positive emotional states as opposed to negative emotional states.

It affects our whole body in terms of our physiology and our brain and it's just really good for us. And over the long term it affects things like longevity. So we have this chance to do two good things at once. If we work using some of these exciting bits of research that are coming through from the pioneer academics who are the ones who are doing the fascinating psychology experiments that people do, them and their subjects, out of which we get really useful knowledge that we can take into workplace and start helping people and the organization be better.

Joe: How could someone contact you?

Sarah: We have our own website, www.appreciatingchange.co.uk. I have an email address, which is [email protected], and we have a UK phone number, which is 0845 055 9874.

Joe: You will also be exhibiting at the CIPD annual conference in Manchester this year. What are the dates for that?

Sarah: That is November 6th to 8th. And it is in the Central Conference Hall. It's a great exhibition if you're an HR person. People do come from abroad as well, so it's quite international and they have, the exhibition is great, there is also a conference. If anyone's got the funds for that as well, this is the highlight conference in the UK for the HR community, that’s highly recommended too.





Joe: Well, hopefully my listeners of the podcast will stop by and say they heard about it from the Business901 podcast.

Sarah: Well that would be wonderful, and thank you so much Joe for creating the opportunity to share some of this good news with people.

Joe: This podcast will be available at Business901 and Business901 on the iTunes store, and I want to thank you again very much, Sarah.

Sarah: Been a pleasure.





Joseph T. Dager

Lean Marketing Systems

Ph: 260-438-0411 Fax: 260-818-2022

Email: [email protected]

Web/Blog: http://www.business901.com

Twitter: @business901

What others say: In the past 20 years, Joe and I

have collaborated on many difficult issues. Joe's ability to combine his expertise with "out of the box"

thinking is unsurpassed. He has always delivered quickly, cost effectively and with ingenuity. A brilliant

mind that is always a pleasure to work with." James R.

Joe Dager is President of Business901, a progressive company providing

direction in areas such as Lean Marketing, Product Marketing, Product Launches and Re-Launches. As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt,

Business901 provides and implements marketing, project and performance planning methodologies in small businesses. The simplicity of a single

flexible model will create clarity for your staff and as a result better execution. My goal is to allow you spend your time on the need versus the

plan.

An example of how we may work: Business901 could start with a

consulting style utilizing an individual from your organization or a virtual assistance that is well versed in our principles. We have capabilities to

plug virtually any marketing function into your process immediately. As proficiencies develop, Business901 moves into a coach’s role supporting the

process as needed. The goal of implementing a system is that the processes will become a habit and not an event.

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