Have you ever tried to make something work without success? Maybe you found a fragment traveling alone? A fragment is a part of a whole that has been torn out in a way that make it impossible to recreate the whole.
If you ever travelled with electrical things like computers and hairdryers, you probably discovered that it is impossible to use the same power plug all over the world, so the power plug you are traveling with is a small fragment of a power grid.
You can find the same phenomenon in leadership and cooperation. If you take popular ideas like LEAN, coaching, benchmarking, customer surveys and blue ocean strategy they are fragments of something bigger. So if you hope they will improve your practice you might be disappointed when you try to make it work.
None of these concepts work on their own and you always have to integrate them into the whole of your own practice. If you get inspired by a new concepts, you should remember Leavitt’s well known model often called Leavitt’s diamond. Here is the model.
If you are surprised with the way it looks, you probably want to know where I found this version. It is from Managerial Psychology by Harold J. Leavitt fourth edition 1978 page 287.
Leavitt spends 8 pages on explaning the logic and the sequence in the model and the intention of the model is to explain managerial psychology. It goes something like this: To perform a task you need people and a structure and make sure information and control is in place AND you have to adjust it to the enviroment, where the task is performed. He points out that when you introduce new tasks you have to adjust all the other parts of the diamond and he introduces the environment with this argument: “The modern organization is a city dweller. It lives in a pressing, crowded world. And it presses back. So let’s enclose our model in a world.”
Then it becomes quite evident that it is a good idea to get inspiration from the outside world, if you remember that the best inspiration comes from looking closely at the whole diamond of the things that inspired you and the city it comes from.
Most of the ideas in leadership and cooperation work, where they were discovered. But it is much easier to understand it when you see the whole thing work live on the location where it was found. It is even better if you look at all the parts of the diamond and ask what makes each part work and how is it connected to the other parts.
Most of the things you need to know is not technical or abstract. So you need a story of the positive deviations from your own practice. Leavitt gave us an idea on how to do that. But the diamond is a fragment of a whole.
Edward T. Hall says we surround ourselves with human extensions, that make it possible for us to do things with our body and mind that otherwise would be impossible. He also reminds us that the transfer of human extentions often fails. If you have a hard time getting a new idea implemented, it is often hard because important parts and connections of the whole it came from, is missing in your application of the idea.
Most of us have experienced that we had to change when something important changed. Some of us have tendency to wait until it is really necessary to make a change. And most of us have to work hard to learn fast enough when it really matters. Here I will present some ideas on how to prepare youself for change when you need it.
McCall and Kaplan identified some of the things that are needed before managers decided to change and presented it is Whatever it takes in 1990.
The general tendency was that managers did not begin to look for new solutions before they acknowledged a problem, felt an external pressure and had access to the necessary resources. It could be related to the concept of a learning organization, where the idea is that you have to prepare for potential problems and learn how to solve them. The concept of learning organizations was the answer to the question: How come some of the large oil companies went under in the oil crisis’ in the 1970ties and other large oil companies survived? The answer was that they were better at learning during a crisis.
If you have to learn how to learn as well as learning to solve the problems you will have a hard time. That is also why pilots have to train for emergencies. There are two things you don’t want in a crisis. Panic and paralysis, cause by anxiety.
Real change is not really connected to solving known and acknowledged problems. It is connected to a gerneral wish and need for change without knowing the specific set of solutions you need and the path to the future. Both of them need to be constructed on the way and adjusted as you learn how to make it work.
What you need to develop is a clear sense of
- purpose and a passion to fulfil it passionately
- your preferred future and challenges you have to face to get there
- the learning possiblities you need to create in order to get there
- the tasks you need to do on the way and learn to do them
- the resources and competences you need and how to get them
This will also replace the external pressure with an internal wish to meet the challenges and you will have to provide the necessary resources often by expanding your network so it includes the people who have access to the resources and competences. This will build an external obligation to work had on maintaining and developing your realtionships to the people who depend on you as well as you depend on them.
You probably know the answer to this question. So let me ask the question again:
- Who discovered the Americas in 1492?
- Who discovered the americas in 1421?
- Who discovered the Americas in 1363?
- Who discovered the Americas around the year 1000?
- Who discovered the Americas about 13.000 years ago?
Our common sense tells us that Christopher Colombus did not really discover the Americas, we know there were people there when he arrived. So why do we believe he discovered the Americas?
We believe Colombus discovered the Americas because we have the written sources telling the story.
We believe the Chinese discovered the Americas because they have all the maps of the Americas in a large archive that has been closed to the public for many years.
We believe a small group of men from Norway and Sweden discovered the Americas because they left a rune stone in Minesota.
We believe a group of vikings came to Northamerica around the year 1000 because the story is written in the Icelandic Sagas and because there are maps showing Vineland as it was called.
We actually don’t know who discovered the Americas about 13.000 years ago. We thought we did, but many new discoveries tell a different story.
We seem to believe things because we were introduced to them by trustworthy people, who claim it is the truth. Even when our common sense tells us it is not true. The scary thing is to think about how much we actually do know! Here in 2009 the common knowledge we had yesterday is usually outdated, distorted or angled by the people who distribute it and often without any support in our own experience and common sense.
Once in a while it is a good idea to ask yourself if you really know something or it is just a story. You might be surprised with your new answers.
If your want more answers to who discovered the Americas you can look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1029313
Teams seem to be the answer to many important questions. Here I will try to find open some of these questions and why we are asking them. Let’s start with two definitions:
- A team is a group of people that have the resources to define, maintain and develop the set of useful solutions to the challenges of the times
- Organizations are filled with teams within teams.
If this definition of a team is correct many of our understandings of organizations is becoming outdated. We usually think of an organization as a relatively closed system. This has become outdated because we have outsourced many tasks and insourced specialists to help us with all the things we do not know our selves.
The client or customer become part of the team. So a school includes the pupils and their parents in the team called a class. A car assembly plant has teams with people from all over the world involved in designing, engineering and bilding a car. If you look closely at the the car industry there are no more than four large clusters of companies working together. The car industry seem to be filled with competition between different brands.
According to a book called Designing effective organizations by Banner & Gagné an organization is a set of beliefs, attitudes and values, which is shared by a group of people. So if you believe that Father Christmans wears red clothes you are influenced by a commercial created by Coca Cola Company many years ago. You are part of Coca Cola’s beliefs and have taken on some of their attitudes and values. Coca Cola spent 100 years advertizing their brand and it is probably one of the largest organizations in the world according to this definition.
The old understanding of work as something you can do alone has disappeared and so has the old understanding of what an organization is and how it works. Organizations has been replaced by new concepts like networks and communities of practice.
Ron Heifetz tries to define how this influence leadership in his book Leadership Without Easy Answers (Belknap, 1994). He calls leadership a “modern ballet” where leader have to dance in a pluralistic society where authority is very limited and goals are unclear. This modern ballet shifts the attention of leaders from solving technical problems to leading change. Change that are based on cooperation in highly competitive environments.
Most companies cannot survive without strategic alliances, competitors cooperate in core parts of their business, private companies like IBM spend millions of dollars every year to improve Linux, which is free for all the users.
All of us belong to several communities of practice where we learn to perform the skills needed to solve the primary tasks of the community and the supporting tasks. Where communities overlap there is a strong tendency to exchange useful practices and to develop completely new practices. This has made open innovation part of internal strategies in many companies. People outside your company is willing to work for free for you. Companies give away their software for free hoping you will help them to improve their products and their business.
But we still draw organizational charts like 100 years ago. Even though the drawing has little to do with our practice. If we team up in networks, organizations could be drawn like this.
How does your organization look like when you team up in networks?
When we communicate we have two old traditions: Discussion and dialogue. Most of us are very well trained in discussion and less skilled in dialogue.
These two traditions create two very different experiences for the participants. David Bohm (On Dialogue) (the Essential David Bohm) has been working with these two traditions in his work with dialogue. He introduces the concept of fragmentation. A whole is based on parts that fit well together, while a fragment is torn out of the whole in a way that make it impossible to put it back into the whole again. His idea is that the way we think influences the way we communicate. Here is his ideas of fragmentation in the way we think and communicate. 
David Bohm was inspired by his own experience with great physicists like Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, who really admired each other, but ended up in a big disagreement based on the fact that they made two very different model of an atom. This disagreement caused them to almost stop their conversation for the rest of their lives and made it hard for the community of physicists to find a way to handle the disagreement.
David Bohm introduced his interpretation of dialogue as a way to overcome fragmentation in thinking and communication. If you want to participate in a dialogue you need to de-fragment your thinking and communication. Here are the principles you need to apply in your thinking and communication. 
If you master dialogue something interesting will happen to you. Here is a description of what happens to your sense of community based on your choice of discussion or dialogue.
One of the main ingredients in Appreciative Inquiry is dialogue. It is one of the life giving factors and forces Davide Cooperrider was looking for in his research.
Human life is constantly filled with needs and wishes. They change over time and so do the sets of solutions we find. Many solutions create new needs and wishes and remind us of other needs and wishes.
In general we need to work from the ambition of BetterSolutionsNOW! Sustainable development is a concept borrowed from biology, but part of nature we call Law of the Jungle. One of the main reasons behind the Gro Harlem Brundtland’s promotion of sustainable development is, that the national states are unable to create change and transformation with the speed and scope the human race needs right now. We need the destructive force of private enterprise to do that. This does not mean sustainable development is without an ethical dimension. Ethics is always about a fight between one good thing and other good things. The good things are needed and wished for by someone. Many of them are left out in the decision making processes that lead to the set of solutions that change their lives.
BetterSolutionsNOW! will demand all of us to learn this approach to change:
- everyone need to recognize they have a shared responsiblity for finding and using solutions that takes good care of limited resources and harm other people as little as possible
- everyone need to recognize they live in symbiotic (mutual beneficial) partnerships with the rest of humanity
- everyone need to recognize they have to engage in dialogues with their symbiotic partners in order to find sustainable set of useful solutions
- everyone need to know how to create and engage in the necessary dialogue with their symbiotic partners
This can only be done by individuals and organizations that know how to handle diversity and know how to be flexible.
We all develop from conception to our last day on Earth. We change every single day. We meet a changed person every time we meet an old aquaintance. A stranger is usually a friend you haven’t met yet. So why do we talk so much about resistance to change? So far I have met noone that does not dream of a better life.
I was told that all people want to make a difference for themself and others by contributing constructively to the communities they belong to. And they hope to make an even bigger difference everyday they wake up.
So change is what we really want and strive to create. But most of us have painful memories of situations where change and development took place. We also have fantastic memories of making a difference.
Life and lifegiving forces are a the heart of change of development. Social life and lifegiving social forces may be the most important topic to study and learn to master for all of us. It involves skills in leadership, cooperation, organizing and communication. Topics we rarely talk about in educations, organizations and communities. Maybe our relationship to development and change could benefit from opening an explicit learning process with these topics?
We could study the lifegiving forces in moments of exceptional achievements in this learning process. Apprecitive Inquiry was born out of such a study. The science of social lifegiving forces may become a bigger force in human development than the internet.
We have known for a long time that leadership matters in human life. Now we know bad leadership is deadly for individuals, organizations, communities and humanity.
I want and I hope to deserve to live in a world with lifegiving leadership, cooperation and organizations. I work with appreciative and strength based practices in leadership, cooperation, organizations and communities, so I know we have the tools and methods to begin to promote Lifegiving Leadership Practices.
When I started working with Appreciative Inquiry, I was often met with the question: Is it a religion or is it a new age movement?
Now some people claim that Appreciative Inquiry has to be LIVED and that you need to BE Appreciative Inquiry to facilitate Appreciative processes and train people in Appreciative Inquiry.
This reminds me of an old book called The Aquarian Conspiracy by Marilyn Ferguson. She says we have five ways of handling change our worldview:
- Refuse the change
- Creating an exception to the rule
- Enter a gradual change, which we normally do not notice ourselves
- Convert to another worldview
- Finding a new perspective that integrates the past experience and the new worldview
It is hard to experience how Appreciative Inquiry work on yourself and other people and stay unaffected. But you need to start practicing to go beyond step 2. I was impressed with what I saw and felt the first time I met Appreciative Inquiry. So I started practicing and and became very good at using it and training people in Apprecitive Inquiry.
I need to believe in Appreciative in order to spread the practice. I have to believe it so much that I can persuade people that I believe in it. I believe Appreciative Inquiry is very useful, but I never converted. I integrated it into an irreverent new perspective. I love the hymn of Appreciative Inquiry, “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” by Johnny Mercer
Most of the converts I have met tend to become fundamentalist and that is not really what I want to promote by spreading Appreciative Inquiry. I have seen too many people who was unable to be Appreciative in the moment. They need some help before they are able to move on in an Appreciative way. And I know lots of people who live happy and prosperous lives without appreciating everything.
Here is a rap (Rythm and Poetry) I made once with a group of people:
Now it is enough
No more grumbling
Obama and Osama are dancing salsa in a world filled with peace
We are all joining in and dance in streets filled with gold
The jews embraces their inner Muslim
While the pope is playing the violin
Were you able to appreciate the metaphors?
If you were I think you have mastered the irreverence that is one of the main things you need to master if you want to live Appreciative Inquiry. Irreverence is at the heart of good humour.
I am confident that you can master Appreciative Inquiry without converting, you just have to practice Appreciative rituals. You will begin to change because you want to, not because you have to. Appreciative Inquiry works best if it is self-directed learning.
I would like to make a collection of Frequently Asked Questions on Apprecitive Inquiry.
It could be about questions like:
- What is Apprecitive Inquiry?
- Why is Apprecitive Inquiry important?
- What is the purpose of Appreciative Inquiry?
- How is Apprecitive Inquiry connected to other theories, methods and practices?
- Is the 4D model the only method in Apprecitive Inquiry?
- How do you design af good appreciative question?
- Can Appreciative Inquiry be applied in conflicts?
- How do you deal with life’s dark sides in Appreciative Inquiry?
- How big ambitions should you have in Appreciative Inquiry?
Which questions are the most important and frequently asked in your life? If you tell me, I will start writing my answers.
Kaj Voetmann's professional Blog 