By Ryan Quinn
I teach a class every year on changing organizational cultures to the MBA for Executives students at the Darden Graduate School of Business. On the first day of class, there are usually some students telling jokes about one of the books that their assignment for the class came from.(1) This book introduces a method for intervening in organizations called “Appreciative Inquiry” (AI). AI assumes that there is greatness in every organizational culture (even though it may be deeply hidden in some), but that this greatness needs to be found, nurtured, and helped to flourish.
As class begins, questions and skepticism about the third book surface quickly. Then, a few classes later, something funny happens. Each of the students is given an assignment to devise a presentation for how they would implement culture change in their organization and to share these presentations with their classmates. Afterwards, a number of students come up to me and express their surprise that so many of their classmates chose AI for their method.
These students are surprised for a number of reasons. One reason has to do with the language used to describe AI. (Words like “positive core” “life-giving,” “dream,” and “destiny” can seem a bit hokey, even though the processes that this language describes are quite powerful.) Language is seldom the central issue, though. When faced with real problems, the idea of focusing on finding and nurturing what is positive can seem naïve to many people.
A similar issue exists in the world of organizational scholarship. For the past six years, we have been involved with a research movement called “Positive Organizational Scholarship” (POS), which is “the study of especially positive outcomes, processes, and attributes of organizations and their members” (1), according to Kim Cameron, Jane Dutton, and Bob Quinn, the founders of the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Researchers who study POS study topics such as positive leadership states, organizational resilience, organizational capabilities for virtues (like compassion and forgiveness), pro-social motivation, positive work orientations, trust, team learning, psychological safety, and much more. The same questions that cause my students to wonder about Appreciative Inquiry could be asked about POS. In a world where our banks seem to be dropping like flies, auto companies crumble before our eyes, and a new and larger Ponzi scheme seems to get revealed every week, what could there possibly be to study that is positive? And even if there are things that are positive, wouldn’t it be more wise to understand our problems and fix them than to spend time studying the positive? How can so many professors spend their time studying such “soft” issues?
In my most recent culture change class, there was an exchange between two students, both of who worked for companies that were in financial trouble and were downsizing their workforce. One said, “I decided to not use AI because trying to get people to focus on the positive during a time like this could really turn them off and make them angry.” The other student blurted out, “That’s exactly why I chose Appreciative Inquiry! Our employees are losing track of what there is about our company that is worth working for. We need to re-discover what is great about our company, help people re-engage with that, and make it grow again.”
A similar argument could be made for why we need POS. In an economy like this, research into the positive can do two things. First, it can inspire. Research uncovers stories—stories that show us what we can be and what our organizations can be. Journalism, however, can also inspire. Research brings us one more benefit that journalism cannot: rigorous answers to the questions of how to create positive organizations, practices, experiences, and outcomes. We can learn from research how to create systems and practices that support responsibility, critical thought, pro-social motivation, and courage.
One of the reasons AI works is because it does NOT ignore problems, but instead reframes and transcends the thinking that creates problems in the first place. In our forthcoming book, Bob Quinn and I draw on the work of a number of scholars to show how a problem-solving focus, although sometimes appropriate, can sometimes exacerbate problems: the tendency to label a situation as problematic can itself be part of the problem. Switching from problem solving to purpose finding, as AI does, can dissolve the problem we thought we had and re-direct our energy to constructing new, positive situations. When POS asks questions about what is the best about organizations and organizational behavior, it can lift our eyes away from problems which may be too intractable to solve, and gives us insight into how we can create the best of organizations and of behavior within them.
Reading a blog on POS in the middle of what may be the most troubling situation our world has encountered may feel to you like it feels to the students who read about Appreciative Inquiry when they take my culture change class. It could also, however, lift our vision to new opportunities that we never see while focusing on problems. This, in many ways, is what leadership is all about.
(1) To see the other two books I use, click here and here.
(2) Page 4 of “Introduction.” Positive Organizational Scholarship: Foundations of a New Discipline. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. pp. 3-13.