The Challenge
‘How can we respond to the staff survey in away that helps to promote a culture change in this organization?’
Case Studies
Written by Sarah about different aspects of using Appreciative Inquiry and positive psychology to effect change in a wide variety of organisations.
The following took place over two years which I spent working with an engineering organisation which faced an existential challenge due to the combination of a change in status to a private business and enormous uncertainty and possibly fatal decline as current contracts ran down. The employees and leaders alike were in great danger of succumbing to fatalism and inertia and had no sense of how the organisation could be saved from a long slow death. This is how we tried to change this mindset.
The Invitation
‘We are bringing in a new ERP system across the whole manufacturing process, it will affect everyone. It will be much more sensitive to accurate data than the old system. People will need to be much more disciplined in the way they record and enter data. Can you help us make everyone enter data properly?’
The Challenge
Five strangers have two hours to prepare for a three-hour consulting session with a client they have never met.
We are a British woman, a Greek woman, two Dutch men, and a Dutch woman. All of us have volunteered to try to help this organisation as part of our two-day experience at the 11th meeting of the Begeistring Network, a European network of people interested in Appreciative and strengths-based ways of working, at Volendam in Holland April 27-29 2011.
We will be working in English throughout. On our first evening we had about an hour to start planning how we might usefully use this opportunity.