Look for the positives at workplace

The coffee room chatter is often the same no matter what company you work for. This (expletive deleted) place! The bleep, bleep management never understands. Other companies do all the good stuff while our people would mess up a two-car funeral!

Tim McGuire
United Media

http://www.spokesmanreview.com/news-story.asp?date=122003&ID=s1458700&cat=section.business

The words change, but the attitudes seldom do. Last week I talked about companies and institutions that too often look at the dark side of things. They focus on the problems in the organization and seldom revel in the good aspects of the organization.

I recently bumped into a movement that addresses this problem head-on with imagination and zeal. It’s called Appreciative Inquiry (AI). Two Case Western University professors, David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, developed the concept in 1987. According to one of the many Web sites on Appreciative Inquiry, the process works on "the assumption that whatever you want more of, already exists in all organizations."

Imagine sitting in that coffee room and talking about what works in your organization. Imagine how weird and, at the same time, refreshing it would be to chatter and gossip about how great your organization could and will be.

Appreciative inquiry operates with a four D cycle: Discover, Dream, Design and Delivery. An article by Sue Hammond and Joe Hall says the eight assumptions of AI are:

•In every society, organization or group, something works.

•What we focus on becomes our reality.

•Reality is created in the moment, and there are multiple realities.

•The act of asking questions of an organization or group influences the group in some way.

•People have more confidence and comfort to journey to the future (the unknown) when they carry forward parts of the past (the known).

•If we carry parts of the past forward, they should be what is best about the past.

It is important to value differences.

The language we use creates our reality.

Hammond and Hall say the exciting thing about Appreciative Inquiry is it helps people create a better workplace, community or lifestyle by looking at what works and determining how to do more of it. They write, "When you do more of what works, the stuff that doesn’t work goes away."

People who revel in criticizing anything positive and forward-looking in an organization will ridicule this approach as "touchy-feely malarkey." But for people who are tired of the constant carping and griping, the simplicity of this approach should be alluring.

The Appreciative Inquiry proponents are saying that every organization has positive elements if we look hard enough and positively enough. And when we find those positives we must make them a basic part of our vision for our organization.

Unlike a lot of organizational ideas that force us to imagine things that might be, AI focuses on the positive parts of our organization’s past that can help us build our future. The process asks us to concentrate on what works well and build on it.

Personal experience, and my e-mail, tell me that many people go home from work absolutely exhausted from all the bickering and complaining that goes on in the workplace. We allow ourselves to be beaten down by the naysayers and purveyors of doom. Too few of us make a stand against those bellyachers, but Appreciative Inquiry can help us create a process to focus on the positive.

Tip for your search

Certainly it would be best for you to recommend to Human Resources that the company consider formally adopting Appreciative Inquiry, but you can get started in your workgroup and in the coffee room. Simply turn your conversations to listing the good things in your organization. What things really work well?

Resource for your search

"The Power of Appreciative Inquiry: A Practical Guide to Positive Change" by Diana Whitney, Amanda Trosten-Boom and David Cooperrider (Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc., 2003)

Tim McGuire is a past president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and former editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He can be reached at [email protected].)