Free excerpt from my new book 'Positive Psychology And Chnage': Features Of Co-Created Change

Co-created change differs in its process and effects from imposed change. Whole-system change methodologies such as Appreciative Inquiry and World Café facilitate co-created change.

This is an edited extract from my new book Positive Psychology and Change

Co-created change...

1. Calls on the organization’s collective intelligence

Participative co-creation involves, from the very beginning, those affected by the change, allowing them to apply their ‘local knowledge’ intelligence at the point at which it can save the organisation both time and money.

2. Creates active participation

Being an active participant engaged in understanding the situation, making sense of what is happened and able to influence decision-making positively affects people’s motivation to put ideas into action. Early involvement effectively bypasses or greatly reduces resistance to change and the need to get ‘buy-in’ at a later date.

3. Involves people actively in the decision-making

When people feel their views have been genuinely sought, appreciated and considered, and they have been party to the evolving discussions, they are much more likely to accept the outcome and to be able to see their influence on it. Having been actively involved, they experience a sense of ownership and commitment to the outcome.

4. Builds social capital

These co-creative methods bring people together across the system and so create greater social capital. Social capital facilitates information-flow, lower level decision-making and trust around the organization, all of which lower organisational cost and increase co-ordination during the disruption of change.

5. Builds on past and present strengths to create sustainable change

Co-creative approaches focus on identifying past and present organisational and individual strengths as resources for the change. Using our strengths is energizing and easier than using areas of non-strength. Being able to construct the change in a way that calls on our strengths can be highly motivating.

6. Understands strengths as the key to a new organizational economy

With an awareness of strengths, we can reconfigure our understanding of the organization as an ‘economy of strengths’. At its simplest this suggests that people can spend most of their time doing what they love doing, within a structure that allows them to easily find people with complementary strengths to their own.

7. Understands social networks as the heart of organizations

Understanding the organization as a social network directs our attention to the importance of relationships in change. It sounds obvious but the language of the organization as a ‘well oiled machine’ or ‘ a bureaucracy’ or ‘an org. chart’ can easily obscure this essential reality. A continual focus on people and their patterns of interaction and communication is a key focus of these approaches. 

8. Recognises the importance of dialogue as words create worlds

It matters both what people say to each other and how they say it. It is easy for people to fall into talking about change in a solely negative way. Creating an opportunity for those concerned to co-create more purposeful, forward oriented, positive accounts of what is happening and their role in the change and the future, and creating opportunities to broadcast this new narrative more widely, can be very beneficial.

9. Recognises the importance of narrative for sense making in action

The accounts we create of the world and what goes on it are our best guides to appropriate action. They are our reality. They aren’t immutable. A key factor in the success of these approaches in achieving change is that they facilitate connected, system-wide shifts in narrative, allowing the team or organization as a whole to create new accounts of ‘what is going on’ that allow new meanings to emerge, or sense to be made, which in turn liberates new possibilities for action.

10. Recognises the energizing and resilience boosting effects of positive emotions

Hope and courage are key to the process of change. It is easy for these to be damaged or reduced during change processes and a key focus of all these appreciative and positive methods is the re-ignition or re-generation of positive emotional states in general, and these in particular. Positive emotional states are a key component of resilience, also an attribute much in demand during times of change.

11. Utilises imagination as the pull for change

We can push people towards change or we can pull them towards change. The former can seem easier and quicker and leads to the desire to create, find or build ‘burning platforms’ for change. The latter is slower, and, since the imagined future is often less immediately available to the imagination than the all too real undesirable present, can be harder to access. However it creates a more sustainable energy for change. Appreciative Inquiry as a methodology is particularly alive to and focused on this.

12. Calls on the whole power of systems

Working with the whole system simultaneously is a key way to involve the power of the organization to achieve simultaneous, co-created change.

Much more about the features of co-creative change, guidance on how to do it, and practical information about on the key methodologies mentioned here can be found in my new book Positive Psychology and Change

Other Resources

Much more about strengths and managerial techniques such as the ones mentioned here can be found in Sarah’s new book Positive Psychology and Change

Sarah Lewis is the owner and principal psychologist of Appreciating Change. She is author of ‘Positive Psychology at Work’ and ‘Positive Psychology for Change’ both published by Wiley. She is also the lead author of 'Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management', by Kogan Page, the second edition is out in September.

See more Change, Positive Psychology and Appreciative Inquiry articles in the Knowledge Warehouse.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715. A selection of strength card packs are available from our online store.

How To Avoid Triggering Resistance To Change: 5 Benefits of Co-Creation

The problem: Silence is not 'buy-in'

Key change questions

Two of the questions most frequently heard when talking to leaders about their plans for change are:

•       How can we get buy-in?

•       How do we deal with the resistance to change?

They reflect assumptions about people and change so embedded as to be endemic.

Assumptions about people and change

These assumptions are that ‘people don’t like change’, and, that people can be ‘sold’ change.

It is true that, on the whole, people aren’t widely enthusiastic about change that is forced upon them without consultation that appears to make their life or working conditions worse. It is also true that people will buy the idea that if they point out the problems that the proposed change will cause, they will be labeled as a troublemaker or worse. Given this, they may stop saying anything. This compliance is often confused with ‘buy-in’.

An alternative approach

Co-creation change processes offer an alternative. By working closely, from the beginning, with those who will be affected by any proposed change, these questions become irrelevant. A number of additional benefits accrue.

Benefits of the Co-creation approach to change

1) Tapping into Collective Intelligence

Participative co-creation taps into the collective intelligence of the organisation at the point where it’s application can have the most effective impact at the least cost - at the very beginning. Involved early, before irreversible decisions are made, people can draw on their wealth of localised knowledge about what works and what doesn’t while the challenge is still being formulated and considered. They can also road-check solution ideas for feasibility before they have become invested with the weight of being the right and only answer.

Utilising the organisation’s collective intelligence leads to better solutions arrived at in a cost effective manner.

2) Creating Active Participation

When people are involved in the definition of the problem or challenge and the design of the solution, they start to make changes in their behaviour immediately. In addition, once formal plans are issued, or projects started, they already understand why and don’t need to be persuaded of, or sold on, the rightness of the action. Co-creation approaches to change lead to faster implementation.

Encouraging active participation in design leads to faster solution implementation.

3) Direct Involvement in Decision-making

When people have direct involvement in decision-making, they are much more likely to accept the outcome. As long as their views have been genuinely appreciated and considered they are likely to accept the evolving nature of the solution. People can track their particular contributions as the answer evolves. Such involvement inspires a sense of ownership of, and commitment to, the final design. Co-creation leads to a high level of commitment.

 Facilitating direct involvement in decisions creates a high level of commitment.

4) Building Social Capital

People who have worked together in a positive way on something that is important to them form stronger social bonds. Collectively the strength of these internal relationships is known as the social capital of the organisation. High social capital means a high level of trust across the organisation; good information-sharing and easy information flow. It also facilitates problem-solving at the level of the problem. Investment in social capital helps to ameliorate the well known problems of silo-mentality. Co-creation facilitates low level, quick and effective, peer-to-peer problem-solving, vital when new, unfamiliar systems are being implemented.

 Increasing social capital leads to coherent, co-ordinated action

5) Leverage Strengths

Co-creation processes that focus on identifying existing strengths and core values as part of the change process help people link the need for change with success and personal integrity. They also create positive emotion that is energy for the change. Aligning the future with the past along the lines of what is best about the current organisation makes it more likely that people will feel hopeful and optimistic about the change and the future. Co-creation based on existing strengths and clear values is likely to be implemented with hope and enthusiasm, leading to a smoother implementation process

 Leveraging strengths and values leads to hope and optimism

How can you implement change like this?

There now exists an abundance of co-creation change processes that help organisations avoid triggering resistance and all the costs and delays incurred with that. They require organisations to demonstrate a different style of leadership, one that is predicated on an understanding that an organisation is a social system, with leadership a privileged position within that system. The role of the leader then becomes to find ways to help the organisation continually evolve towards a better future. To do that the leader needs to call on and release the collective intelligence and capability of the whole organisation.

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at Our Approach to change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715