Ten Top Tips For Creating Positive And Flourishing Organisations

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

Having recently extensively studied the literature, Appreciating Change can exclusively reveal the ten things that you can do that can make your organisation an even more inspiring and positive workplace.

  1. Play to everyone’s strengths

People playing to their strengths are effective, successful, engaged and energised. Their productivity is at its best. Those dutifully struggling with weaknesses are slow, ineffective and demoralised. Their productivity is poor.

  2. Recruit for attitude

People have ‘a good attitude’ when they are using their natural talents, the thing they love to do. Find out people’s natural talents and inclinations because these are the basis of strengths. Recruit for a fit with the core task of the job and to build it into a real strength.

 3. Encourage positive deviation

Encourage performance that exceeds the standard expected in a positive direction. Build an abundant organisation, one that can take pride in excellence. Achieving this takes positive leadership: encouraging, recognising, appreciative, and forgiving. Affirm what is good in the organisation to help it grow and develop.

4. Create a workplace that feels good

Positive emotions are really good for the workplace. They aid creativity, working together, problem-solving, communication and information-sharing, just for starters. Make your workplace somewhere people enjoy being because it makes them feel good.

 5. Build social capital

Invest in the relationships between people. It is through these relationships that information and resource flow to where they are needed. It is these relationships that allow organisations to be responsive to change and to bounce back quickly from trauma.

6. Be an authentic leader

Authentic leaders know their own strengths and how to use them well. They help others develop theirs. They have a strong moral compass and they treat people right. They learn from success as well as mistakes. They admit mistakes, and encourage others to do so too.

7. Create the conditions for change

Directive planned change is ineffective: the evidence is overwhelming. Effective change leaders create the conditions for change to emerge. They work with the emerging process of change. They engage the whole organisation in discovering how to go forward.

8. Create reward-rich environments

People work for many rewards: success, approval, flow experiences, recognition, feelings of satisfaction, thanks, completion, or being with others, for example. The more rewards available to people in their work environment, they more motivated and engaged they will be at work.

9. Make sense together

In this fast-paced, complex world, it is more effective to involve others in a continuous process of making sense than trying to make definitive decisions that will hold for years. Build periods of mindfulness and reflection into your schedule, to help people notice the early signs of a changing world.

10. Be appreciative

Develop an appreciative, eye, ear and tongue. This will help you recognise and grow the organisational strengths and resources. Our appreciative faculties are usually very weak compared to our critical ones; they need positive attention to thrive.

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

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

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

'How do you create a sense of urgency in positive approaches to change?'

This was the question posed to me recently by an HR Director taking up a new post with a big change agenda. He was attracted to the idea of positive change, but working with an organization with a long and successful history, he was challenged about how to galvanise the workforce into engaging with the necessary changes. I thought it was a great question and it has stayed with me.

It has long been known that negative emotions such as fear, despair or anger can act as a spur to change. Leaders and change consultants have sometimes built on this knowledge by deliberately creating these emotions at work, by ‘creating the burning platform for change’.

Such tactics may well produce energy for change, however there are some drawbacks.

·      The energy may not be accompanied by much creativity: the aim is to avoid, not to create.

·      The energy may not be very sustainable: once the threat is seen to have receded the escape        behaviour ceases and old patterns reassert themselves.

·      It tends to produce more compliant behaviour than active commitment.

·      It can create a very unhealthy and unhappy working atmosphere.

So what is the alternative, how do positive approaches to change create urgency? I think we probably need to rephrase the question to how do they create energy and drive for change? How do they create motivation and momentum for change?

We are drawn towards an attractive future

Rowland and Higgs (2008) in their research into how change actually happens (as opposed to the story we have about how change happens) discovered four key things that made a difference to the success of change efforts. One of these was the ability of the leaders to create a magnetic pull towards an attractive future. This I think is at the heart of the answer to our question.

Positive and appreciative approaches to change major on creating hope, optimism, group cohesion, strong visions of attractive possible future states, desire and ambition. They strengthen relationships, build social capital, create interdependencies and identify shared goals or aspirations. They build trust, illuminate shared values, and have a positive effect on motivation and morale.

In short they create a ‘together we can’ understanding of their collective abilities to influence outcomes. This, combined with co-created aspirations for, and visions of, future states, forms the basis of the energy for change.

The tortoise and the hare

A desire for change created from these more positive emotional states may take a little longer to release, discover, create or build, but it is likely to be more sustainable as a force for change. Working with groups you can see when a particular idea about, or vision for, the future really starts to take hold. It won’t go away. It exerts a continuing fascination, an attraction. This creates its own urgency: a desire to engage others with this powerful aspiration. It acts as a powerful light in the hazy vision of the emerging future, allowing for constant re-orientation. It is a pull towards the future and as such tends to create a much more sustainable energy over time than the push energy created by an awareness of the need to avoid present danger. An awareness of present danger can make us jump fast and without thought. An aspiration to achieve a desirable future state can draw us ever onwards.

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

Why make organizational change so hard for yourself? 5 myths busted

Leaders and managers are increasingly expected to introduce changes in work practices, routines and structures as part of their management role. Myths abound about the challenges of doing this. Here we lay five to rest.

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

This belief leads to exhaustive energy going into detailed forecasting and analysis of every possible impact and consequence of possibilities: in the worse cases leading to paralysis by analysis. While one group is over-worked another is dis-empowered as they ‘wait’ for the change. It slows things down, allows rumours to fill the information vacuum, and leads to a downturn in motivation and morale. It is a key contributor to the much-heralded organisational resistance to change.

The ambition is a chimera, it is impossible in a dynamic complex system for one part to map every linkage. 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: creating shared sense of possibilities, taking the first steps, reviewing progress, learning from experience and involving those who know the detail in their areas.

2. You can control the communication within the organisation about change 

This 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 those initiating change.

It is impossible to control inter-personal communication and sense-making, we can only seek to influence it.  People are sense-making creatures who constantly work to make sense of what is happening around them. 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 wider, more informed, different or corrective perspective.

3. To communicate about change is to engage people with the change

This belief 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.

To believe this is to confuse intent with result. 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...?’ ‘How can we positively influence this process?’ People have to use their imaginations and creativity to start visualising 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.

4. That planning makes things happen

This belief in ‘plan as action’ fuels a plethora of projects, 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'.

Planning is a story of hope. Creating plans can be an extremely helpful activity as long as we realise 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 in the wider world.

5. That change is universally disliked and resisted

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

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.

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 about how we can help to change your organisation's Culture.

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