The LIFT Blog

Robert E. Quinn

This week I had the opportunity of working for an hour with a group of ten high school kids.  I knew they were used to being bored, expected to be bored, and planned to be bored.  So I asked myself what they most cared about.  I went into the room and made it possible for them to talk about the feelings of insecurity and loneliness in high school, and I asked them to consider some alternative realities.  No one was bored.We covered a lot of ground.  I asked them to list the afflictions that they are likely to encounter in their future.  The list was sobering to all.

I asked what they would do when these bad things happened to them.  We explored different possible responses and concluded that the assumptions we make about life are very important.

Then we talked about how to insure that we lived a meaningful happy life in the midst of very real challenges.  We talked about the capacity to change ourselves.  In simple terms I tried to help them see that from our normal experiences we derive assumptions of what the world is like.  We then act on those assumptions to create experiences which tend to then reinforce our assumptions.  So we tend to get stuck in a life path we might not desire.

I suggested that one way to change is alter where we place our attention.  I suggested that we learn to look for the extraordinary in the ordinary.  If we see extraordinary things in our everyday lives, our assumptions change and we create new experiences that give rise to still new assumptions.  It becomes possible to grow and flourish.  We can be secure in our new and more adaptive self and we can behave in ways that give rise to more meaningful and lasting relationships.

Research

That is what I see happening to me as I do my work.  My research and writing takes place in a new field called positive organizational scholarship (POS).  It is a subfield within organizational studies.  It differs from most other subfields in that it includes an affirmative bias.   That is, POS researchers tend to look for that which is “exceptional, virtuous, life-giving and flourishing.” [1]

This emphasis is important.  It recognizes that excellence is a form of deviance.  The positive perspective shifts attention from what generally is expected and observed at the middle of the bell curve to the extraordinary things that occur on the far right side of the curve.  The positive observational bias leads to the evidence of what happens when people and processes are at their best.

Since the findings in POS research inherently illustrates how things can be better, the findings are not just facts. They also inspire change, images of a desirable, possible future.  They therefore have the capacity to elevate emotions, thoughts, behaviors and interactions to higher levels of functioning and the emergence of new and more adaptive forms of living and organizing.  For this reason POS tends to be a change perspective, a scientific subfield with great potential for helping people construct the world they want to live in.

I find that as I study POS my life assumptions evolve.  So I try new things and I create new experiences.  In the new experiences I find confirmation of my evolving assumptions.  So my life view is further enlarged.  I see more possibility.  I have a greater sense of agency and hold myself accountable to envision the future I want to create.  I feel more driven to clarify my values so I am more courageous and authentic.  I am more open to feedback and learning.  With this increased, adaptive confidence, I can behave in ways that give rise to more meaningful and lasting relationships.

Bottom Line

The high schools kids were not only paying attention, they seemed to get the message.  The target of our attention matters.  If we choose to look for the extraordinary within the ordinary, we will find it.  We will then be drawn into a new set of assumptions and we will construct a better life and a better world.

Cameron, K. E., J. E. Dutton and R. E. Quinn (2003). Positive Organizational Scholarship: Foundations of a New Discipline (p. 5). Berrett-Koehler: San Francisco.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 5:11 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.