New Work, New Ways

NewWork Opinion Home

New Work, New Ways

NewWork Opinion

Home

We are immersed in a world of new work. From e-commerce and e-mail to palm pilots and wireless computers, the digital revolution is not only changing the way we do business, it is changing the very nature of our products, services, and work environments. However, in spite of the remarkable technological breakthroughs of the past decade, relatively few breakthroughs have occurred at the human level of organizations. True, some companies have flattened their organizational hierarchies, others have introduced teams and a few have found new ways to involve all stakeholders in planning and decision-making processes; but, for the most part, we have not made significant changes in how we design and lead our 21st century organizations.

Much of the new work is being done in organizations that are designed in old ways. Is this a problem? The data suggest a resounding yes. Recent studies indicate that most organizations at any point in time are seriously under-performing. James O'Toole, Research Professor at the University of California's Center for Effective Organizations writes: "Few companies come anywhere near achieving their potential, whether that is measured by profits, growth, market share, product quality, innovation, customer service, or employee development" (1999, 3). Collectively, we still hold limited and limiting beliefs about the people potential of our organizations. Therefore, organizational capacity has changed very little over the past decade, though technological capacity has changed a lot.

It's the "new wine in old wineskins" dilemma. Our outdated beliefs about organizational change taint the new wine of the organizational change efforts that are flooding today's organizations. Reengineering is a good example. A study by Hammer estimated that 67 percent of all reengineering projects fail and that 60 percent of these failures are directly attributable to resistance to change (Head 2000, 27). It is easy to jump to the conclusion that we can't change organizations until we find ways to overcome the basic human tendency to resist change. Such thinking, however, radically oversimplifies the problem. There is much evidence to support the premise that humans don't automatically resist change; sometimes they embrace it with great gusto. Resistance is typically caused by the how, not by the what. In other words, people resist the way change is introduced, not the targeted outcomes. What rational employee would resist a more efficient process or a higher quality of work life? Yet, such resistance is a common occurrence in today's workplace. It appears that, if we are to create new work organizations in a world that is changing at warp speed, we must find new, more successful ways to introduce change.

Appreciative Inquiry is an example of a process that can be used to create positive organizational change. Appreciative Inquiry, or AI as it is commonly called, is based on the assumption that change happens best when we focus on what's right in our organizations, rather than focusing on the problems that need to be solved or changes that need to be made. At first blush, this approach seems totally illogical. Therefore, if we are to understand Appreciative Inquiry, we must first learn to appreciate the power of the paradox. A paradox is simply something that is true or factual but seems contradictory or opposed to common sense. In the workplace we are all familiar with the "slower is often faster" paradox--a truth that we sometimes have trouble remembering in our ready, fire, aim organizations. The paradox of AI, the assumption that change happens best by focusing on what's right rather than on what's wrong, sounds pretty absurd but let's look more closely at the theory behind this approach and at some of the results achieved in Appreciative Inquiry initiatives.

AI evolved from the 20th century philosophy of Constructionism--a philosophical approach that recognizes that humans construct their experience of reality through their choice of language. From this philosophical perspective, "language is not a way to understand the world; it is the power of language and the relational use of it that actually creates the world...we see what we believe" (Mohr, et.al. 2000, 52). In other words, what we talk about determines what we notice, and what we notice becomes our reality. Cooperrider and Whitney explain: "The questions we ask set the stage for what we "find" and what we "discover" (the data) becomes the linguistic material, the stories, out of which the future is conceived, conversed about, and constructed." (2000, 18).

This way of looking at reality leads us to a new way of viewing the workplace. We begin to see organizations as subjective human constructions, rather than as objective, predictable machines. We begin to realize that they are shaped by the images that their members hold. Therefore, the most powerful thing we can do to support organizational change is to help people replace negative organizational images with new, more positive ones. An effective way to do this is to construct an inquiry that identifies current examples of desired organizational behaviors--behaviors that are already in place, though perhaps organizationally unnoticed and unappreciated. For example, if we are concerned about teamwork, we would collect stories of best-team experiences. If leadership is the concern, stories of stellar leadership could be gathered. These stories would then be disseminated throughout the organization in an effort to create new images of positive possibility.

Appreciative Inquiry is premised on the basic assumption that people can't create what they can't imagine. Stories of organizational excellence serve to fuel peoples' imaginations with new, more positive images; and, these images in turn refuel organizational energy, replacing stress, burnout and despair with hope, inspiration, and positive anticipation. Appreciative Inquiry is a structured process for tracking (identifying) and fanning (reinforcing) those behaviors that give life to an organization. "When we inquire into the things in our organizations that are life-giving, we begin to understand that we can choose to focus on those qualities. Through asking others to join in our inquiry, we can have a considerable impact on the image of our organization and, ultimately, on the way it functions "(Mohr, et.al. 2000, 52).

A story from Avon Corporation provides insight into the AI process. Avon, an international cosmetics manufacturer and home distributor, had been wrestling with issues of gender conflict and diversity for several years, especially in Avon's operations in Mexico. After spending millions of dollars on traditional interventions and finding that the number of lawsuits and complaints just kept increasing (along with negative evaluations from the required sexual harassment training programs), senior management decided to take a dramatically different approach. Rather than continuing to try to fix this very significant problem in logical ways, they opted to try Appreciative Inquiry. Their first step was to run an ad in the company newsletter, asking employees to volunteer (in pairs) to share their success stories about working effectively with members of the opposite sex. Based on the scope of the problem, management was hoping for a dozen or so volunteer pairs. Instead, hundreds of people spontaneously replied.

The next step was to train 100 employees in the basics of AI interviewing. These volunteer interviewers conducted 300 interviews with the pairs of people who had volunteered to share their success stories. At the end of each of these initial interviews, the interviewer asked if the interviewee would be willing to help find more success stories and conduct more interviews. "A waterfall was experienced. Stories poured in--stories of achievement, trust building, authentic joint leadership, practices of effective conflict management, ways of dealing with sex stereotypes, stages of development and methods of career advancement." (Cooperrider and Whitney 2000, 8). Using the content of these interviews as examples of internal cross-gender best practices, management made over 30 important internal procedural shifts including the decision that all committees and project teams would be chaired by a cross-gender pairing. Dramatic changes occurred in Avon's internal processes, systems, and culture. A few years after launching this Appreciative Inquiry, Avon Mexico received the 1997 Catalyst Award as the best place in the country for women to work.

GTE is another AI success story. Appreciative Inquiry began at GTE in the mid 1990s as a pilot program that was implemented in order to see what would happen if front-line employees were trained in the basics of AI and then turned lose to gather positive data throughout the organization. This pilot project exponentially expanded as more and more people asked to be trained in the inquiry process. Soon the Positive Change Network, PCN as it came to be called, attracted thousands of GTE employees. Each employee conducted interviews, seeking to identify positive examples of what was working well within their company. They gathered stories of exceptional customer service, inspired leadership, and productive partnerships. Over 10,000 innovations were attributed to the Appreciative Inquiry process, earning GTE the 1997 American Society for Training & Development award for best organizational change program in the country. Tom White, President of what was then GTE Telephone Operations comments:

Approaching issues from the other side by focusing on what's going right has produced highly positive outcomes for numerous other organizations as well. For example, at the U.S. Postal Service in Milwaukee, 124 managers participated in a research study to determine the effectiveness of AI as a team-building process. These managers were divided into 3 research categories. One third received training in AI, another third participated in traditional team-building activities, and the remaining third served as a control group, receiving no structured intervention. Not only did the AI group of managers score significantly better on measures of current performance and future optimism, they also were able to bypass the "storming" stage of group development and quickly began to function as an effective team (Head 2000, 59).

Another recent AI research project was conducted within a Fortune 500 restaurant chain (Wendy's International). The purpose of the study was to determine whether or not AI could improve manager retention. Ninety-four of the company's fast food restaurant managers in a major metropolitan area participated. These 94 managers were divided into 3 groups. One group was trained in AI. The second group of managers used traditional "problem solving" approaches to develop strategies for reducing turnover. The third group served as the control group and simply went on with business as usual. The results at the end of the two-and-a-half-year study were quite impressive. The managers in the Appreciative Inquiry group not only had a higher retention rate than the two control groups, managers in this group also expressed a much increased appreciation of working within the restaurant industry. Management retention was, in fact, 32% higher in the AI group than the control group and 30% higher than in the problem-solving group (Jones 2000, 202).

These results are impressive, but not pervasive. Most organizational leaders continue to focus on problems, thus creating defensiveness and resistance and depleting the energy of their most precious resource--the people upon whom they rely to do the work. How can we make this quantum leap? How can we as leaders learn new ways of leading that are robust enough to meet the challenges of the 21st century workplace? How can we integrate more appreciation into our problem-focused organizations? We can begin today to notice and talk about what's working at work. We can begin to practice the skills of tracking and fanning, constantly scanning (tracking) our environments looking for positive examples of what we desire and reinforcing (fanning) any action that resembles whatever we are looking for--always remembering that the questions we ask create the workplaces we later discover. As we do so, we will begin to experience the paradox of appreciation--discovering that the best way to fix a problem is to pay attention to what's working rather than to focus on what is not.

We have reached the end of the problem-solving paradigm. It's too slow, it keeps us focused on the past, it generates defensive reactions. Its utility is simply not congruent with the challenges of a virtual world and a digital workplace. In this quantum age of technological miracles, we should take Albert Einstein's words to heart, remembering that "we cannot solve problems with the same thinking that created them." Are you ready to use new thinking to create new ways to optimize the potential of your workplace?

Cooperrider, D. and Whitney, D. (2000). A positive revolution in change: Appreciative Inquiry. In D. Cooperrider, P. Sorensen, Jr., D. Whitney, and T. Yaeger, (Eds.), Appreciative Inquiry: Rethinking Human Organization Toward a Positive Theory of Change (3-27). Champaign, Il: Stipes Publishing.

Head, T. (2000). Appreciative Inquiry as a team development intervention for newly formed heterogeneous groups. OD Practitioner, 32 (1), 59-66.

Head T. (2000). Appreciative Inquiry: Debunking the mythology behind resistance to change. OD Practitioner, 32 (1), 27-35.

Jones, D. (2000). A field experiement in Appreciative Inquiry. In D. Cooperrider, P. Sorensen, Jr., D. Whitney, and T. Yaeger, (Eds.), Appreciative Inquiry: Rethinking Human Organization Toward a Positive Theory of Change ( 195-206). Champaign, Il: Stipes Publishing.

Mohr. B, Smith, E., and Watkins, J. (2000). Appreciative Inquiry and learning assessment: An embedded evaluation process in a transnational pharmaceutical company. OD Practitioner, 32 (1), 36-52.

O'Toole, J. (1999). Leadership A to Z: A Guide for the Appropriately Ambitious. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc.

NewWork Opinion

NewWork Opinion