Working with the need for convergence in a divergent conversation

Appreciative Inquiry and other co-creative methodologies are essentially divergent ways of working together; the emphasis is on the value of diversity and variety. Such ways of working can trigger a pressure to converge on a few key points very early in the process, indeed sometimes before the event has even begun. This pressure can be the expression of various different needs, for example:

• The need for sense of coherence and co-ordination
• The need for sense of moving forward or making progress
• The need for a reassurance that there is a degree of commonality amongst the differences and divergence being expressed (that the group isn’t going to splinter)
• A request for amplification of points of agreement (a visibility of commonality)
• A need for a convincing story for other audiences of the value of the day
• A desire for a record of the intellectual learning, to accompany the experiential learning of the participants
• A request for tangibility
• A demand for a guarantee that something different will now happen

At its root this is often a request for a reassurance that there is a positive, sustainable momentum to action that won’t die the moment the session ends; this fear is often based on prior experience of away-days. There is often a fear that the day is ‘just a talking shop’ and that unless clear outcomes and actions are written down ‘nothing will happen’.

In addition, our ‘emergent’ ‘exploratory’ ‘unfolding’ description of how the day will run can feel very alarming to those commissioning our work, such as leaders, used to much more controlled ‘facilitation’. A focus on the need to converge can be a request for reassurance that the ‘complexity and diversity’ they are agreeing to work with can, in the end, be drawn back to somewhere safe and contained.

Ways to moderate this demand, so that it doesn’t distract from the day’s activities include:

• Bringing the leaders and other audiences into the event so they experience the change in the room, in the system, in the moment. This reduces the reliance on ‘planning’ as the driver of change.
• Working to help leaders understand that their role in this kind of change is to ‘ride’ the energy it produces; to co-ordinate activities rather than to command and control them. This reduces their feeling of needing to understand everything all at once.
• Working with leaders on their unchallenged or unquestioned stories of leadership, helping them behave differently around change and leadership. This can help reduce anxiety about being solely responsible for achieving change.

How to meet the need without compromising the spirit of our endeavors?

In discussing this we realized that there are two slightly different aspects to this. The first is a need to create sufficient coherence so that the system can move forward. This can be done very much in the same spirit as the rest of the day, with questions and activities focused on creating coherence amongst the group.

The second is the need to create a tangible or visible record of the level of agreement.

• 1.Making visible patterns and levels of coordination and coherence amongst the divergence.
• Use reflecting teams to reflect key points of agreement or action
• Use commitment and request conversations
• Have a last ‘action round’ for example in open space. Or a last ‘linking’ round of ‘golden nuggets’ from conversations in World Café
• Move into the domain of production – acting ‘as if’ we knew the world and therefore can have certainty.
• Ask those present questions such as, what story are we going to tell ourselves (and/or others) about what we have done here today and are going to do tomorrow and in the future? Who else needs to know? And how will you get the resources to do what you now believe needs doing?
• Ask people to make individual commitments to what they are now going to do differently or different
• Ask people ‘Given all we have discussed today, what is possible?’
• Ask the group what else needs to happen for them to go away convinced that something is going to change

How to create create some very tangible or visible record of the level of agreement.

• Use dots or ticks to get individuals to select out of all the ideas or points that have emerged, which are most important (or some other criteria) to them. Gives an instant ‘weighting’ picture.
• Popcorn. Get people to write on a post-it the most important thing that has come out of the last conversation, for them. Sort and theme
• Pyramid. Start people in pairs identifying four or five top things. Then pair up with another pair and produce a new list of top four or five etc. until whole group are narrowing down the last few contenders.
• Get projects (with first draft name) and what it is going to achieve, on flip charts with interested parties and a first step to making something happen.
• Help group prepare something for absent sponsors who appear at the end of the day, about the best of the day and intentions for the future.

A few further helpful hints

• Everything is everything else. In this instance how you work with commissioners and leaders from the beginning affects the helpfulness or otherwise of the hunger for convergence later on.
• Life is always a compromise
• That the leader focused on how convergence will be achieved is essentially asking:

‘How will I, and my organization, survive the diversity, complexity, confusion, multiplicity and richness, you are proposing to unleash? Please reassure me that we won’t fly apart, that it will be safe, that it will be productive’

This is a very reasonable request for reassurance. It is a strong sign that the person wants to go forward yet has concerns. The is challenge in offering sufficient reassurance so that we are able to continue moving towards the day, while maintaining sufficient freedom of movement to be able to work with the balance of need in the room on the day.

Appreciating Change will be delighted to come and facilitate divergent events to convergent ends for you!

How ‘Change Management’ Can Be A Hindrance To Achieving Organizational Change

We are constantly told that, in today’s world, change is a permanent feature of organizational life. Given this is it surprising the extent to which organizations struggle with the concept of change in organizations. Myths abound. Working with organizations I constantly hear the refrain ‘people don’t like change’ and ‘change is hard’. Neither of these statements are necessarily true, as we see below. What is true is that the way we understand organizations, understand change, and go about achieving change can make the job much harder than it need be.

Part of the problem is that our ideas in this area are outdated. We think and act as if the organization is a perfectly designed and aligned machine that we can plan to reconfigure, and then just systemically and mechanically set about reconfiguring. The organization is not a machine; it is a living system of people with its own internal logic and ways of behaving. We need to work with the dynamic, inventive, thoughtful nature of our organizations, not against it. In the same vein, our views of leadership can be a hindrance to achieving fast, responsive and adaptive change. We act sometimes as if we expect our leaders to be all seeing, all knowing, all powerful. They’re not. However they are increasingly expected to introduce changes in work practices, routines and structures as part of their leadership role. Unknowingly they have often picked up some unhelpful ‘rules of thumb’ about implementing change at work. Here we expose the fallacious thinking behind five of them.

You can’t implement the change until you have thought through every step and have every possible question answered.

Not True. In many situations it is sufficient to have a sense of the end goal, or key question, along with some shared guiding principles about how the change will unfold. For example ‘We need to produce our goods more efficiently’, or, ‘How can we cut our process times?’ With these in place leaders can call on the collective intelligence of the organization as it embarks on learning by doing: taking the first steps, reviewing progress, learning from experience and involving those who know the detail in their areas.

This ‘all-seeing’ belief leads to exhaustive energy going into detailed forecasting and analysis of every possible impact and consequence of possibilities often leading to paralysis by analysis. It slows things down, allows rumours to fill the information vacuum, and creates feelings of disempowerment. Worse of all it disregards the huge knowledge base that is the organization; wasting organizational assets.

You can control the communication within the organization about change

Impossible! People are sense-making creatures who constantly work to make sense of what is happening around them. This means it is not possible to control communication in this way. By withholding information we convey something, usually distrust or secrecy. But more than this, in this day and age with so many communication channels instantly available to people, there is no chance of being aware of everything that is being said about the change. Instead leaders need to focus on making sure they get to hear what sense is being made of what is going on so that they can contribute a different or corrective perspective.

This ‘control’ belief leads to embargoes on information sharing, ‘until we have decided everything’ (see above) and much investment in finding ‘the right words’ to convey the story of the change. Meanwhile people are free to make their own sense of what is happening uninhibited by any corrective input from management. And when the carefully chosen words are finally broadcast, leadership is often dismayed to discover that they don’t work to create a shared sense of the meaning of the change.

To communicate about change is to engage people with the change

Not necessarily. People start to engage with the change when they start working out what it means for them, what it ‘looks like’, where the benefits or advantages might be, how they can navigate it, what resources are there to help them. They find out through exploration and discovery. They become more engaged when they are asked questions. “How can we implement this here?’ ‘What is the best way of achieving that?’ ‘What needs to be different for us to be able to…?’ People have to use their imaginations and creativity to start visualizing what their bit of the world will be like when ‘the change’ has happened. Everyone needs the opportunity to create rich pictures of what the words and ideas in the change mean in their context. The answer to the question ‘What might it mean for us?’ is jointly constructed and evolves as new information emerges.

The belief that communication alone equals engagement leads to an over-emphasis on communicating about ‘the change’. Staff hear managers talking endlessly about how important this change is, how big it is, how transformational it will be, yet no one seems to know what the change actually means for people. To be part of this scenario is to suffer a confused sense of ‘but what are we talking about?’ This in itself is usually symptomatic of the fact that at this point there is only a fuzzy picture of what this much-heralded change will mean for people: much better to get people involved in finding out.

That planning makes things happen

Sadly no! How much simpler life would be if it did. Creating plans can be an extremely helpful activity as long as we realize that what they do is create accounts and stories of how the future can be. Until people translate the plans into activity on the ground, the plans are just plans. For example I might develop a really detailed plan about emigrating to Australia, including shipping and packing and visas and job prospects and everything you can think of, but until I do something that impacts on my possibilities in the world, for instance by applying for a visa, then planning is all I have done. Plans are an expression of intention. Things start to happen when intention is enacted.

This belief in ‘plan as action’ fuels a plethora of projects and roadmaps and spreadsheets of interconnection, key milestones, tasks, measures and so on. People can invest time and energy in this fondly believing that they are ‘doing change’. A much more energizing alternative is to bring people together to start exploring ‘the change’ and generating ideas for action, and then to write documents that create a coherent account of the actions people are taking.

That change is always disliked and resisted

No. If this were true none of us would emerge from babyhood. Our life is a story of change and growth, of expansion and adaptation, of discovery and adjustment. Do you wish you had never learnt to ride a bike? That was a change. Had never had a haircut? That was a change. What is true is that change takes energy, and people don’t necessarily always have the energy or inclination to engage with change. It is not change itself that is the issue, it is the effect imposed change can have on things that are important to us: autonomy, choice, power, desire, satisfaction, self-management, sense of competency, group status, sense of identity and so on. If we attend carefully to enhancing these within the change process then there is a much greater chance that it will be experienced as life-enhancing growth like so many other changes in our lives.

This much repeated and highly prevalent belief leads to a defensive and fearful approach to organizational change, inducing much girding of loins by managers before going out to face the wrath of those affected by the change.

So, what is the alternative? Once we give up the idea of the leader or leadership team as all knowing, of change as a linear and logical process of compliance, and of people as passive recipients of information, we can start to work in a much more organization friendly way with change. Many new approaches that focus on achieving collaborative transformation are emerging such as Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space and World Café. These approaches recognize organizational change as a collective effort, as a social process that can be inspiring and dynamic with leaps of understanding as well as being messy and confusing at times. They work with the best of the human condition – the importance to us of our relationships, our imagination, our ability to care and to feel and to create meaning in life. In this way they release managers and leaders from the impossible responsibility of foreseeing all possibilities and instead liberate the organization to find productive ways forward in an ever-changing organization landscape, together.

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques to create change can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more about change 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 and Culture change.

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

Positive Deviance: Learning from, and creating, exceptional performance

This blog article has an accompanying article on positive culture, and an accompanying case study on culture change

What is positive deviance and why is it a good thing?

Positive Deviance is an exciting methodology emerging from an understanding of organisations as complex adaptive systems. It helps organisations learn from those who manage to achieve better than normal outcomes from within the same resource constraints as their colleagues.

It is one of Kim Cameron’s distinguishing features for flourishing organizations: they both learn from and create positive deviance. Flourishing organizations are interested in exceptionally good performance and they learn from it. Some of the earliest examples of how learning from positive deviance can make a real difference comes from community work.

For example... 

For instance an early example of positive deviance was in a poor Vietnamese community. In this community there were many starving children yet some families were doing better than others in feeding their children. A positive deviance investigation by the villagers themselves revealed that the more successful families were taking shrimps and crabs from the rice fields i.e. had realised an additional source of protein. Some others were spreading their rice ration out over 24 hours, which is better for young children. These were things that theoretically everyone could do but not everyone did. These are positive deviance strategies. Of course there were also other factors such a having a rich relative who sent supplies. However these strategies are not available to others and so are known as true but useless (TBU) strategies. A key factor for the success of the intervention (i.e. achieving behaviour change) was they got the villagers themselves to do the investigation.

Positive Deviance investigations are being used very successfully to reduce super-bug infection rates in some hospitals. 

It is a very effective way of ‘growing’ a better culture. By recognising that small variations in performance always exist and by focussing on and amplifying the variations in a positive direction the whole organization can be encouraged to move in the direction of the best.

Appreciative inquiry as a methodology works on the same principle of identifying  positive deviance, learning from it, and increasing its presence in the organization.

When might investigating positive deviance be the way forward in an organisation?

With thanks to Lisa Kimball from Plexus

When…

• There is some existing deviance e.g. some people are doing better than others in a similar situation (performance variation across team or division)
• It’s a really intractable problem
• It involves behaviour change
• Everyone knows what to do, they are just not doing it
• The situation is bathed in data. It really helps if the groups can keep track of the changes they are making and their impact
• There is top leadership support. This means top leadership support the process through releasing resource, being responsive to early efforts and initiatives, and tracking, recording and amplifying results.

How to do positive deviance

1. Ask about success
2. Compare best to near best to tease out small differences that make a difference
3. Encourage peer to peer inquiry (and analysis) into success
4. Identify strategies for success (discounting TBU factors)
5. Support with behaviour change strategies
6. Support with top leadership resources: interest, budget, encouragement, action

This blog article has an accompanying article on positive culture, and an accompanying case study on culture change

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 how we help with Leadership and Culture change.

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

‘I wouldn’t have started from here’ - The Challenge Of Bringing Emergent Change Insights To Planned Change Projects

Planned Change - The good and the bad

When organizations decide they need to make changes in the way they work, their culture or their IT system they often default to a planned change approach. Typically LEAN specialists and programme managers if not already present are hired and the process of organising a top-down driven change process begins.

This approach has its strengths. It often reveals scope for improved efficiency, but more tellingly, it presents change as a problem of data and logic and makes change look manageable, sequential and what I can only describe as ‘tidy’. Unfortunately it also leads straight to the ‘how to get buy-in’ and ‘how to overcome the resistance to change’ conversations.

Planned change approaches inadvertently encourage people to give up trying to contribute to the change conversation or to influence how it happens. They can become passive, demotivated and demoralised, waiting to be told what to do. It is when the downsides of this approach become apparent that people find their way to me, presenting their challenge as a problem of dis-engagement, poor morale, people needing support during change.

Bringing in Emergent Change

We know that emergent, dialogic, psychological, and co-creative approaches to change such as Appreciative Inquiry, World Café, and Open Space act to motivate, engage and energise people and connect to their desire to influence their own future, to be part of the change process. The challenge is how to bring them to the party when the planned change process is already in full swing: when one’s first thought upon engagement is, ‘well I wouldn’t have started from here’ – but here we are.

How To

There is an art to bringing value from our perspective under these circumstances. We need to work at the interstices, in the gaps that emerge in the planned change process. In working with this challenge, there are some principles for engaging that I have found useful.

1. Work with who you can, where you can

You may not be able to get ‘the whole system in the room’, that doesn’t mean you can’t work in these ways with the bits of the system you can gain access to. Use all opportunities to help people start to understand change as an emergent phenomena that they can influence, even as planned change is unfolding all around them. Bring your appreciative questioning style and your positive focus on strengths and good affect to all opportunities. Work wherever you can, with whoever you gain access to the move the focus to: what we can do, what we can influence.

     2. Adapt processes to fit the opportunities

I have used Appreciative Inquiry approaches working with parts of the system over a series of events, pulling it all together through another series of events (multi-events for one process); with one group in small chunks of time over time (one event split over time); and have developed one-day ‘roadworthy’ Appreciative Inquiry processes when unable to negotiate the longer time I would have desired. I have found Appreciative Inquiry to be an incredibly robust process that acts to re-energise, re-motivate, re-engage the disillusioned, disengaged and demotivated time after time.

    3. Encourage awareness of possibilities of local influence and control

Help people and groups focus on what they can influence. Usually the idea that top management ‘has got it all planned out’ is a myth. Top management don’t have brain space to attend to every last detail. If people want good decision making in their own area they need to seize the initiative and start presenting ways forward. Help groups focus on what is important to them in the change and on how they can influence the wider system. Once again Appreciative Inquiry is great for this. It is these conversations that start to rekindle hope, optimism, motivation to engage.

     4. Keep bringing key ideas to the fore

These are some of the ideas that need encouragement and reinforcement as planned change swings into gear, and that you can bring to any conversation or situation you are able to negotiate entry to:

• Volunteerism - people are being pushed around enough already, try to make any specific events you are able to run optional (and very attractive!).
• Co-creation – always ask ‘who else can we usefully involve in this?’ Encourage leaders to take questions to their teams in a co-creative (e.g. not just consultative) way. I find the notion of ‘drawing on the collective intelligence’ often helps with negotiating more involvement by lower level staff.
• Positivity – focus on creating positive affect, it really helps create resilience during a difficult time. Encourage others to recognize the continuing importance of positive mood boosts. Many ‘rewarding’ experiences disappear during change as people go ‘heads down’ and pleasurable interactions can lessen.
• Strengths – people are more energised, engaged, motivated etc. when they can use their strengths to achieve their objectives. Help groups focus on identifying these and working out how to draw on them: individual strengths, group strengths, organisational strengths.
• Hope and optimism - In my experience these can be early casualties of planned change. Using appreciative techniques helps people focus on the best of the past and their hopes for the future. Hope is also part of the ‘building resilience’ challenge.
• Pro-activity – encourage people to take responsibility for how they are engaging with the change and the effect they are having on others around them. It’s the antidote to the ‘being done to’ feeling that can be so strong during planned change
• Leaders’ face – be mindful always of leaders’ face. They are (usually) doing their best to do the best for the organization, and they are doing it the only way they know how. As we help people make sense of what is going on, we need to help them recognize this.
• Story and Choice – Unhelpful stories often emerge during change about the motivation for change in general and to explain leaders’ behaviour in particular. These are often stories of blame, inadequacy, deficit and deceit, nefarious motives and so on. We can remind people that there are many truths about a situation, and situations are often paradoxical. We can remind them that they have a choice about the story they choose to tell, both to themselves and to others and that the telling of stories has impact for action.
• Amplifying success – in change people get so focused on what isn’t working they lose sight of the fact that they are still achieving things. Bringing these to the fore helps with morale, pride etc.

See Case Studies of how introducing emergent change into planned change can work in practice

Case Study - Making The Virtual World Visible

Case Study - Cultural Change

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 the tools we use to foster Emergent Change.

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