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 organization was going through a planned change process centred on the introduction of a new IT system and work processes. Less acknowledged was the appreciation that this was only part of a larger ‘culture change’ aspiration. After a long initial internal consultation process, the project was launch and small group of 7 managers were designated to work with the consultants and internal programme manager to drive the implementation through.
Appreciating Change was approached by the HR and OD managers who were picking up some discontent amongst staff as the project entered the implementation phase, and some uncertainty from managers about how to ‘lead’ through the transition time. They wanted to offer help and support to both these groups. We decided that the offerings needed to be ‘bite-sized’ i.e. a couple of hours, so that over-stretched people would feel they could take the time to attend them. And that attendance should be voluntary and self-selecting. It was very brave of the HR department to agree to this.
In 2009 I ran a series of large group events at a manufacturing organization. The organization was about to introduce a new Enterprise Resource Planning IT system and needed to help everyone become aware of the changes in behavior needed to get the best of the new system, particularly the need to enter very accurate data. The investment in this new IT was symbolic of a wider shift in the culture of the organization.
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.