Appreciative Inquiry Podcast Transcriptions

Appreciative Inquiry Business901 Podcast Transcriptions

Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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Table of Contents

Blending Appreciative Inquiry and Continuous Improvement: Guest was Ankit Patel Appreciative Inquiry Introduction: Guest was Sara Orem Mastering Positive Change: Guest was Sarah Lewis Lean and Rowe, Friend or Foe: Guest was David Kasprzak Strength Based approach to Lean and Six Sigma: Guest was David Shaked Working Positive in a less than Perfect World: Guest was Dr. Joey Faucette Building Positive and Engaging Business Improvement: Guest was David Shaked Positive Organizational Development Tools Guest was Sarah Lewis Opening Appreciative Space Guest was John Steinbach

Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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Blending Appreciative Inquiry and Continuous Improvement Guest was Ankit Patel Ankit Patel, a principal partner with The Lean Way Consulting firm while doing some work with the Cleveland Clinic, discovered Appreciative Inquiry and saw an opportunity to blend it with his work in Continuous Improvement.

Ankit Patel is the founder of The Lean Way Consulting. Prior to starting The Lean Way Consulting, Ankit was a Lean consultant for Dell Inc. overseeing Dell's Manufacturing and Re-Manufacturing production processes in Lebanon, TN. Ankit helped guide the multibillion-dollar plant in strategic planning, coaching executives at the plant, facilitating Kaizen events, and training Lean leaders at all levels of the organization. Ankit is no stranger to the board room or the shop floor and has run several strategic initiatives as well as 100's of Kaizen events.

Ankit has also had several years of small business ownership. He has owned a Liberty Tax Service, started his own online computer education company My Computer Buddies and has been a partner in a sandwich shop and a motel. Ankit has guided a variety of small and medium-size businesses ranging in services from veterinary clinics to tattoo parlors.

His experience to change and grow companies ranges from small businesses to multinational fortune 50 companies. Ankit has an Industrial Engineering Degree from Georgia Tech and lives in the Nashville TN area. You can follow Ankit on the blog http://theleanwayconsulting.blogspot.com/.

Joe Dager: Welcome, everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of the Business901 podcast. With me, today is Ankit Patel, who is a principal partner with The Lean Way Consulting. Prior to that, Ankit was a Lean consultant for Dell Incorporated, overseeing Dell's manufacturing and remanufacturing production processes. He's also done work with the Cleveland Clinic, improving their culture and processes. Ankit's recent work has led him into bringing Appreciative Inquiry to the field of continuous improvement.

Ankit, could you clean up that introduction a little bit for me and tell me what led you into the Appreciative Inquiry field?

Ankit Patel: Thanks, Joe. I appreciate it. No pun intended there. My background has traditionally been in Lean and Six Sigma. Before that, my college degree was in industrial engineering. I come from a pretty heavy process-improvement background. When I did some work at the Cleveland Clinic, I actually saw the clinic was doing something pretty unique: they were using Appreciative Inquiry. But they weren't Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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necessarily applying it to continuous improvement. What I noticed was that there's an opportunity to blend the two approaches. For those that don't know, Appreciative Inquiry, at the basic level, is looking at the strengths in the system and the people. So, what's working well, and how can we take what's working well and build off of that? What I did was I said, what if we took that approach, start from a strengths-based approach, as opposed to what's called "deficit-based," which is where typical process-improvement activities start as and see how that works. What I did was I worked with the Heart and Vascular Institute. Actually, for those who don't know, they're definitely number one in the country, and they're probably number one in the world, in terms of their procedures and the care for any kind of heart problem that you have.

One of the projects I did with them was helping them with the turn time between procedures: how do they make that more efficient? What I did was say, "Let's take a look at the strengths-based approach and appreciative approach and how that could get better and working with you to improve that." What that led to was things like standardization, things like takt time versus cycle time, checks and processes and auditing, how we're doing, putting in checklists, all these things that we typically see with a Lean or a Six Sigma or some sort of process-improvement implementation, but the driver was from the positive psychology.

Because of that, we were able to get a lot more traction with it. Folks who participated in the process were much more bought into the process and really, really were gung-ho about it. What I really noticed was that ability to really sustain and help sustain these processes was critical when you came from that angle. That's a little bit about how I got into it.

Joe: You look at Appreciative Inquiry; we'll call it AI as we go on, and you use AI as a starting point. How do you relate that to solving problems?

Ankit: AI, like I said, takes the approach of organizations is a mystery, and there's a lot of good things that happen. What you are doing is your end result is still the same, you improve the business, and you sustain results. The difference is in how you approach focus. What you're doing is, one, you're focusing on as much of the entire system as possible. If you're looking at, let's say improving one department including as many people in the department as possible in this AI process. Then you go into what's called the discovery phase. What's going well? What are some of your best experiences you've had here? If you want to make it topic specific, what are some of the best customer experiences that we've had?

What caused that to be such a good customer experience? Then extrapolating that out to OK, how can we do that more often and make it a norm instead of a one-off occurrence we see once every two months?

At that point is really a great place to introduce the how. Once you start to get into this is what we want to do but how do we get there when you start introducing things like standard work, things like the DMAIC process of how do you get a rate to improve processes. Things like PCA cycles and some of the other cycles like you have come up with to really show how you can bridge the gap between where they are and where they want to be.

Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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The trick is AI gives you that initial drive and that pull for wanting to change. I think that's a night and day difference with the projects I've run AI versus non-AI. Joe: In problem-solving we always think about the five 'whys' in finding the root cause, but what you're saying is you concentrate upfront with maybe the what and the how instead of the whys?

Ankit: I think it's a blend of that. It is a little bit of the five whys, too, but its why are things working well and not just why things are broken. Don't get me wrong; we're not going to completely ignore all the deficiencies and what's not working. AI is just a great starting point of initiating your change efforts.

What you'll do is you'll be able to find the what and the how and also the why, but try to term it in terms of success and wins that people have been experiencing. From a psychological standpoint, it actually ends up opening you quite a bit more, you active a whole different region in your brain. People just tend to react differently once they've focused on the positives. It doesn't seem like a huge difference, but the actual results that you see from different approaches can be quite significant.

Joe: Are you trying to empower the individual, more so than sitting there and breaking down what's wrong?

Ankit: That's one big thing. When I do these type of activities if I choose a traditional try to break it down and what's the wrong approach you get very defensive type reactions sometimes. You'll get these reactions of, "Well, you know, this isn't my job," or "That's not accurate; I don't believe it." And people tend to get defensive because even though you're not indicting them as a person, they feel attacked because they feel some sort of ownership over the processes that you're looking at. But when you take that approach, the AI approach, of let's look at the strengths, you get all sorts of different reactions. I've had folks say things to me like, "Wow, this process that we're going through," referring to the AI process, "it gives me hope. I've never really thought of it this way. It's such a cool and unique way of thinking about it. I really think that we can make this happen; we can really get some significant change put in place." So all these different...you get a whole set of different reactions. You get people energized versus beat down or very, you know, best case, mutual, emotionally.

That has a lot to do with your future efforts when you work to sustain the changes. That drive and that pull for people that are engaged that are, you know, activated, I'll call that activated, they're just so much more push and drive to really get change put into place.

Joe: Can you give me examples of some of the questions that I might use to lead into an encounter, or lead into a process and take more of a positive approach when we start out?

Ankit: Sure, absolutely. I'll give a couple of examples. I use a lot of AI with strategy. One of the approaches with strategy, I did an AI initiative with an organization here called the Organization Change Alliance, and what I asked them was...well, first off, what they were looking to do was grow their organization. They're a nonprofit association for org development. What we did was we said OK, let's take a...here's a three set of questions that we want you to answer to do some initial data collection, just with the board. And so what we said was, the first question, what is it that attracted you to the OCA, Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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which is called the Organization Change Alliance, what attracted you to the organization? They would all talk about it, and they'd pair off in their views.

The second question is OK, what do you think is happening that's just fantastic, and we're just knocking out of the park, and you want to see that continue into the future?

The third question there would be OK, let's imagine you fell asleep, and you wake up 10 years later, and the OCA has grown beyond your wildest dreams, everything you ever imagined is in place. What does it look like, and what are some of the steps that the organization took to get there?

What you're doing there is building successes off the past, and isolating core factors that are really working well, and then building a vision of the future. When you get folks thinking in terms of that, they start getting more hopeful; they get more engaged; they get more passionate to drive forward.

Another example would be, let's say you're working more on a profit level. I'm working with a client at an IT service company, and one of the things they're looking at is the speed of closure. They're an IT recruiting firm. They want to reduce the time it takes from the time they get a rec, a requirement, or a job, and the time it actually gets filled.

One of the questions that we would ask the recruiters is, "Tell me about a time when you had just expedient customer service and closure of a job that you had on the table." We asked them that question and started getting ideas --"Let's talk about that experience."

Then the next part of that question might be something like -- well, there are a couple of parts, but one of the parts was, "If you had to bottle the top five characteristics of what made that experience so great, what would you put in that bottle?" The again same concept there, trying to isolate the factors.

The third part is looking into the future of designing, what it would look like if everything was like that top experience that you experienced, that you went through.

The basic format is: what worked well in the past, what are the key factors in how you design a future around those factors. That's just an initial starting point, though. So, it's a very integrative process. Each situation is different. With the OCA, the Association, we'll actually be going back and drilling down into some more specific topics. We're going to ask those topics in a bigger session with both members and also nonmembers that we would like to become members to get their feedback on how to improve.

With the IT recruiting firm, the service-based industry, what we're going to do is actually take those pieces that we found, and once they're finished we're going to integrate them into some process change recommendations, and we're going to start bringing the team back to the table and say, "These are some things we thought of. Now how do we go and do this moving forward?" Things like; we need to standardize, and we need to change our prioritization matrix. Those type of things.

Joe: Sounds like you're doing a Hoshin with Appreciative Inquirer over the top of it?

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Ankit: Exactly. It's a great way to drive that. I've used it in several different respects, not just process improvement but Hoshin, as well.

Joe: You mentioned the 4-D's in your conversations, maybe not a tool, but certainly a concept of AI? Ankit: You have the four D processes, Discovery, Dream, Design, and Destiny. Discovery is basically the data collection, asking those interview-based questions, getting that information from folks. The Dream -- you can do that a little bit while you do discovery --, but Dream is, "What's possible? What does the future hold? What can it be?" And then Design is the, "Now we know what we want to be. How are we going to make that happen? What does it look like? What are the specific design elements?"

That's a great place to interview some of the process improvement teams. Then you have Destiny. That's also another word for sustaining, but "How do we carry this forward and make sure these things get put into place." Again, a great place for these CI type tools.

Joe: It sounds a little bit like PDCA. Ankit: It does, surprisingly, right? It's funny how that works. Just like PDCA, you'll go through these cycles repeatedly. We'll go through this 4-D process multiple times when doing our Hoshin planning, once with a board, once with maybe a larger group, and then maybe once again after with another substantive population. It's several rounds, several times. It just depends on each situation. But you're right it's very similar to a PDCA session.

Joe: When you talk about problem-solving, people think of it very much in linear terms. The things that I've read on Appreciative Inquiry, they're talking about circular questions. Is there a difference in that thinking? What's really the basic difference between the two?

Ankit: I would say that traditional process improvement is a little bit slightly more linear, and there's nothing wrong with that at all. I think that's actually a much-needed skill set. But look. I think where the AI process really excels is at nonlinear type, breakthrough type of issues. If you want continuous improvement, traditional continuous improvement tools are great for that. If you want serious breakthrough types of initiatives, there are some tools in the continuous improvement belt that help with that. AI seems to work much, much better for that because of the nonlinear nature. It allows folks to break free of necessarily what they think is possible because it lets them just think bigger. So you do end up getting much, much larger types of initiatives.

I'll give you an example. Roadway Trucking. They did an Appreciative Inquiry, what they call, Summit.

They actually had their own drivers come up with their initiative for a specific depot that could save $1 million. I think that was if I'm correct, for Roadway Trucking, about 40 percent of the total revenue. It was an extremely aggressive goal, but they came up with that goal because of this whole process.

Now would they have achieved that otherwise? Possibly, it might have been an edict from the top down, but because they came up with it, they were actually able to achieve it and get a lot of good cultural outcomes from that, as well. People felt more empowered. People felt more engaged. You get Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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fewer turnovers from your folks. People are happier to be at work. It's just a really, really neat way to approach any kind of problem or opportunity.

Joe: I'm from a sales and marketing background. Everything I've always been taught was that I needed to solve a problem for a customer. How can I use Appreciative Inquiry in sales and marketing? Can I? Ankit: Well, I think you can. I've actually done sales before. What they taught us was you've got to appeal to one or the other things. You've got to appeal to a pain point or a hope and an aspiration. So AI really goes to that hope and aspiration, but I think you can use both. I actually haven't used AI in sales, but just thinking it through it seems like what you could do is obviously listen to what the customer wants. But you can actually talk through what their hopes and aspirations are what they would like to see. That's a very appreciative approach to doing a sales piece.

You could actually ask appreciative questions, like that future state question. "Well, where would you like to be 10 years from now if everything's successful?" If "everything is great, this is where I want to be," it's like, "OK. Well, I can get you there. This is how I can help you meet your vision of the future."

I think that's probably the best way to use AI, but again I haven't had direct experience with using specifically AI with sales. But I would envision it being used that way.

Joe: It would be a great way to set the expectations of both parties.

Ankit: Yes, exactly.

Joe: Are you familiar with SOAR at all?

Ankit: That's actually the methodology I use for OCA is the SOAR methodology.

Joe: Is SOAR just another discipline of AI? Ankit: It is. I would say it's like a subset, yes. Instead of using the typical SWOT analysis, you'd just go SOAR analysis. But you're really getting the same things. You're just framing them differently. Instead of having threats in there, what you do is, you say, "Well, what are the opportunities that we have from some of the "threats" that might be out there?" So it's just a different way of framing it and looking at it slightly differently.

Joe: Do you use that in Hoshin? Instead of a SWOT analysis?

Ankit: That's exactly what I use. I like to use SOAR. Most of the times I can use SOAR and be fine with it and get away with it. Occasionally you do have to look at things like threats because sometimes people just won't accept that there's an opportunity in the threat, like government regulation. So OK, we'll leave it at, "OK, maybe it is a threat," but we try and keep it at the SOAR level.

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Joe: When we start out with AI, go through the discovery, dream, design, and destiny that has to be a difficult change for a lot of us. Especially if we're engineers and from a problem-solving culture, that's not an easy step; it seems like we're jumping across a pretty big chasm there?

Ankit: Actually, I use this with engineers, and surprisingly, they've been some of the most appreciative of the process. They've actually really, really got a lot from going to this. They felt energized. I don't know why, but some of the best comments...like I've had one engineer tell me, "This is the first time in a very long time I've got hope that things can be better." Things like that are said a lot. I'm not sure what it is, but there doesn't really seem to be, one group may not like it versus another. If the person doesn't necessarily see a value with it, they may or may not get anything from it. But it's not going to be for everyone now. Appreciative Inquiry is not one of those things that everyone will see value in right away.

Joe: Have you seen what the resistance is or the time that you would not definitely use it?

Ankit: You know, honestly the best place to use it, I'll refer to what one of the best cases to use it and then talk about when may not be such a good place to use it. But the best place that I've seen to use it is when someone is willing to have the whole system participate in coming up with a change. Whether it's a process change or whether it's a strategy change, but involving the whole group in this process or as much of the whole as possible. That is where AI excels. Where there may not be a need for this or may not be best with this is with a typical, we'll call it more of a dictatorship style of leadership where it doesn't matter. Whatever the team comes up with, it's my way or the highway. There won't be as much success there. There may be a lot of energy with a team, but regardless, the leadership team may still do what they want versus what the team wants.

Those are the types of areas where a traditional process grid may be a slightly better approach just so they can get the results, but they will get the cultural benefits of doing something like AI. Joe: Are there ways I can practice to get better at this? Are there certain tools out there and certain things that I can say, "Gee, I want to do more of this approach"? What can I do to get there? How can I start training myself?

Ankit: What you need to do is not that difficult. It's more of just looking on the positives and the strengths in people and situations. There are a few good resources out there. I believe AppreciativeInquiryCommons.com or .org. That's actually a great site. There are a few books out there on Appreciative Inquiry. David Cooperrider is the founder of Appreciative Inquiry. Any book by him is pretty good. There's the "Appreciative Inquiry Handbook." There are also some other books that are pretty good just in terms of positive psychology. There's a book called "Positivity" by Barbara Fredrickson that's good. My website actually has a few articles and blog postings on Appreciative Inquiry and how to get started with process changes.

So there's definitely a lot of resources out there, but ultimately if you want to take something away from this podcast today, just ask "What's working well?" instead of asking "What's broke?" That one thing

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alone is a great place to start. But you need to see what's broke. Obviously a lot of us have been trained in doing that.

Look for what's actually going well and how you could take what's working well and grow that. That would be my advice. If someone wants to get better at AI, that's a great way to start.

Joe: If I take AI, I still need the "why" and solve the problems eventually, don't I? Ankit: Yeah, absolutely, and that's what the end goal is that's why having someone who's been through the process actually really helps. I think we've talked a lot about more of the touchy-feely types, but, by using this process, I've actually got a lot of really good results. For instance, reduction of patient wait time at the clinic by 40 percent just by using this process and combining it with some CI tools. Reduction in turnaround time by about 44 percent using this process and again, things like standardization. These aren't necessarily unheard of things, but where the difference is the results that we saw was, the team actually was able to sustain these changes over a long haul. That's usually the trick with a lot of the change management efforts.

The other thing, too, we also noticed was less turnover. There is a lot less turnover with employees who are engaged in this manner. So we took another area at a small manufacturing firm that I worked with that had a turnover of 19 percent, using Appreciative Inquiry and then tried to show them the ropes on how to do line design. They reduced their turnover down to three percent. They really got their folks engaged.

There's a lot of really cultural goodness you can get from it. Quite honestly if you're the owner of the business or if you're a manager you don't want to be the one that has to do everything and decide every single thing. You want those self-organizing teams that will be able to solve problems and fix things and come up with great ideas of their own. That's really what AI gives you, is that infrastructure to be able to do that.

Joe: Now, what are you doing right now? Are you practicing Appreciative Inquiry? Are you still doing the Lean Six Sigma organizational things?

Ankit: I do both actually. I look at primarily small businesses and some health care industries, but primarily small businesses, and taking a look at both strategy and process improvement. What I've really noticed I really like to do is apply the Appreciative Inquiry with that. What I find is that by integrating the Appreciative Inquiry approach, you really get a lot of drive and a lot of cultural improvements for small businesses that you wouldn't necessarily have. For instance, with one company that I worked with, the IT recruiting firm again, they were stagnating at around $3 million in revenue a year. Just by doing a simple Appreciative Inquiry Approach, getting them energized, and going through a simple Hoshin plan, we were able to double that. The trick was; some people might say, "Well, the Hoshin plan would have gotten you there anyways."

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Maybe, but what I've noticed was that the folks were able to sustain those changes. That's why I really like that AI being put in there. But to answer your question, it's not just AI. I use it as a lead and frame most of the discussions I have and most of my approaches. But it's not the end-all be-all. It's definitely more of an enhancer to what's already out there.

Joe: You talk about using AI at the beginning. Then you give it credit for sustaining things. Can you tie those two together for me?

Ankit: Really where sustain comes in is that the folks, because of this approach, become energized, and you start getting the pull for these changes. Instead of the changes being pushed down to folks saying, "You're going to change. You're going to do this," they're saying, "Well, we want to change ourselves."

Once you get that level of buy-in, then your probability of sustaining goes up really high. That's really why I like this approach because it does get people engaged. If the management team can use that energy correctly, sustaining happens pretty much every time for at least a year. I've seen that attract folks that they'll sustain changes made.

Joe: Is there anything you'd like to add to the podcast about AI or maybe on the relationship to continuous improvement that I didn't ask?

Ankit: I think the biggest thing is that so many times as continuous improvement practitioners we focus in on what's broke and what's wrong. We don't look at how that necessarily affects the people side of things. You go into a meeting sometimes, and you feel like you're getting beat down. AI, as I said, is a great way to get the information and get the results you need without having you feel like it's beating down. If anyone has any questions on this, please feel free to reach out. If you have any questions on where to get started, I'm more than happy to help.

Joe: How can someone get a hold of you, then?

Ankit: They can go to my website to contact me, TheLeanWayConsulting.com. Or you can actually send me an email. It's ankit@theLeanwayConsulting.com.

Joe: Thank you very much, Ankit. I appreciated the time. I think you gave a great explanation of AI and how it's used‌ Ankit: Thanks, Joe.

Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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Appreciative Inquiry Introduction Guest was Sara Orem Sara L. Orem, Ph.D., has twenty years of management experience and fifteen years of management consulting in and to major financial services companies in the U. S., Britain, and Australia. Her current focus is on the development and use of positive methods, including Appreciative Inquiry in coaching and group processes. Appreciative Coaching describes in detail the method Sara has developed for her coaching practice, which serves women and men looking at self-started transitions.

Sara teaches in the area of leadership development and has led leadership development efforts among global leadership teams and as part of succession planning efforts. She often coach leaders in transition as part of these consulting contracts.

Sara has consulted to small non-profits, large corporations, and government agencies around the themes of leadership development, leadership transition and change, organizational change, and using positive processes to accomplish any of the aforementioned.

Appreciative Inquiry (sometimes shortened to “AI”) is primarily an organizational development method which seeks to engage all levels of the organization by taking an “asset-based approach.” It starts with the belief that every organization and every person in that organization has positive aspects that can be built upon. It asks questions like “What’s working well?” “What’s good about what you are currently doing?” David Cooperrider is generally credited with coining the term ‘Appreciative Inquiry.’

Sara’s Website: http://www.saraorem.com/ Sara Orem: I borrow, teach, and work with other faculty to try to help them be more effective in the course room, sometimes have a better presence in the course room. All of Capella is online so that when I talk about having a presence in a course room it's not me standing in front of 30 learners; it's me communicating via the Internet in emails and discussion responses to them and presence is really important because that's how we met.

I do some consulting for a local company that works primarily with city and state agencies and large nonprofits. I do that work usually with people who are currently not in a happy place. I've worked with transportation agencies and the juvenile probation department in San Francisco.

The trick is to turn the mindset around the management in those places. That really helps them speak to people in a different way, speak to the people who work for them in a different way.

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I'm trying to develop a topic around appreciative teaching, and I've done some blogging about that on my website. I don't know if that turns into my next book project, but that's what I'm currently interested in.

Joe Dager: Welcome everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of the Business901 podcast, and with me today is Sarah Orem. She is one of the co-authors of "Appreciative Coaching," and we've been just chatting here a little bit about appreciative work, and I find it quite interesting on the different uses. Can you just give us a brief summary of what appreciative is, Sarah?

Sara: Appreciative coaching comes from the work of David Cooperrider, who is the co-creator of Appreciative Inquiry. Usually, he and his adviser at Case Western Reserve University are given credit for that co-creation in so far as David did his initial work under Srivasta, who was his mentor and adviser.

There were several more people in his class who worked on that project, and they have also continued to work in the area of Appreciative Inquiry. There are maybe five or six people who were in on the ground floor, and then there were a small group of consultants that helped Dave shape his original ideas for organizational work, and now it's out in the world.

Joe: When you think about the subject, it seems odd that it's just surfacing now and becoming popular.

Is it new? Is it really that new to take an appreciative look at the world versus what I talk about from the problem-solving side?

Sara: It's really not new. In fact, I was looking at a discussion thread in my school's discussion, which is mostly populated by students, an initial posting about we should have a certification for learning this new positive psychology and one of the people in the psychology department responded and said this is not new. What I think is different here, Joe is the organizations still work from a problem-solving angle or perspective when something goes wrong in an organization. We may end up in the same place, but where Appreciative Inquiry starts is not hunting for what's wrong but hunting for what's right.

It's not that that's never been done before, but I think there are three or four branches or methods that have come out of or that jumped off of Appreciative Inquiry in the last 25 years to really look at the world from a place of love, for lack of a better word. I know that's a big no-no in organizations, but to look at the world with gratitude, to look at organizations with gratitude, to look at issues with real curiosity I think is the word that I often fall back on.

I think if you're genuinely curious about the world that is a very open way of being and discovery whereas if you're in a problem-solving way of thinking you're looking for the thing that is wrong.

Curiosity may uncover something that doesn't work very well, but it may just as often discover something that's really, really exceptional.

Joe: I think it's a great word. Curious is a great word to look at it.

Sara: It invites a different way of thinking, I think. That's all.

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Joe: I had someone when I was talking about Appreciating Inquiry say, "Well, to me, it sounds like sitting there playing a soccer game and not keeping score." Do you look at it that way? Is there's teeth to it?

Sara: I think that there are wonderful skeptics, and I am as grateful for the skeptics as I am for the people who clap their hands and want to come along immediately. I have lots of those skeptics in my course room because I teach in the Masters in Business Administration and the Doctoral program in Business. I get guys who are Six Sigma people. I get mostly men but not exclusively, women too, who are in some sort of quality process, and they're very used to doing things in a particular way and believe that that's the best way.

I have no doubt that it is the best way often. What I ask them to do is to have a particular scripted conversation with somebody in their organization with which they have some kind of tension.

Often it's an employee that they're really frustrated by, and I ask them to have this conversation and very, very often the skeptics come back, and they say, "I didn't know. I never knew this about the person that I talked to, and amazingly we've solved this problem I've had with them in 15 minutes where I've been trying to solve it for four years."

I think it comes to a place of genuine curiosity people open up to it in a way that they don't open up to problem-solving.

Joe: When you have that conversation with them, what's the essence of it? How did you start?

Sara: Well, there are four core questions, and I tell them when they start this conversation to use whichever of the questions seems most appropriate in the conversation. You've read the four core questions in the reading that you've done. The first one is usually what gives life to you now? Well, for lots of people in organizations that don't mean anything. What do you mean what gives life? I can't relate to that question. Often I say, "Where do you get your energy?" When you come to work, and you're going to go through an eight hour day, what do you look forward to? What are the things that you really like to do? The second question describes the peak experience.

I often start with that question or that statement in a coaching situation because all of us have had a peak experience, all of us had something that really made us happy, made us proud, that we really thought we had some great achievement.

Then describe your values or the values of the organization if you're doing it within an organization.

Finally, what one or two things do you want to be different? For most managers and employees, they know what they want, the other person to be different.

There's something different between telling and asking. If they start with that question, if they say, "What one or two things would you do differently or what would you like to do differently about X?" and X is usually the thing that's frustrated them for four years.

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The person opens up in a way that's quite different from being told for the 43rd time that they should do X in a certain way. It invites a completely different kind of conversation. I can then say, "This is not my best deal." I just had a performance evaluation at my university, and my boss said, "Well, you could be a lot better at administration." I said, "Not getting any argument from me. I could be a lot better at administration."

He said, "Well, that's different. I expected you to be defensive about that." Well, because of the work that I do and the way I see the world, there's no point in being defensive. I know that I'm not good at administration. I know that there are ways that I could be better. It's never going to be my strength. I think that's also part of Appreciative Inquiry is owning up to the things that you have to handle or have to get handled.

If you have to get them handled then maybe, somebody else can do it. For whom the administration is their gift; it's not mine.

Joe: It's like saying you just need to be positive about everything. That's hard to do. Is that really realistic?

Sara: It's not realistic. Barbara Fredrickson, who has another book that you all might like. It's one of my very favorites. It's called "Positivity," and Barbara is a well known academic, a very highly respected academic. She says that we're hardwired for negativity, and we were hardwired for that for a purpose, and that was that there were lots of things in the world that were dangerous. Lions and tigers and bears.

We lived in caves, and there were wild animals, and there was maybe not an ever-present danger, but there was an often present danger, so we were wired to look for danger. The worrier in us will look for danger in the fact that we didn't get a raise or we'll look for danger in the fact that our significant other didn't say good morning to us. We are negative beings, and to some degree, that's also genetic. There are some of us who are more negative than others.

What positivity is about is intentionally raising the level of the positive interactions that we have in our life during our day, during our week, during our month. Barbara has done many clinical studies that show we're more creative; we're more open to ideas, and we do our best work when we're in this frame of positivity.

Joe: Can we do this on an organizational level? Can an organization embrace these concepts?

Sara: Lots of organizations have, and the one that may surprise you the most is the military. My adviser or one of my committee members and a peer person in my life is Frank Barrett, who was one of the graduate students, along with Cooperrider, who worked on this project. Frank worked with the naval leadership school in Monterrey, and the armed forces have embraced Appreciative Inquiry and have been very, very active in using it to approach new projects and to take a solution focus to things that they want to be different.

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One of those things has been the reduction in funding, the downsizing of our military presence in our own country and other countries, the loss or closing of bases. Those are all things that have been approached through Appreciative Inquiry.

Joe: What are some of the pushbacks that you get when this is first addressed? Is there or do you just approach it positively that it's really not a pushback?

Sara: I would say that I get lots of pushback. When I first was Dr. Orem, and I was doing some consulting for a person who had been my boss, and I said that I wanted to introduce a new sales program that we were going to do in the bank, and we introduced the same salesperson in a bank where this person had been my boss. He moved to another bank. I described how I wanted to initiate it with Appreciative Inquiry, and he looked at me with his face scrunched up, and I didn't know what the scrunch meant, but I knew something was coming that he didn't like. He said to me, "Could we use different words?" The words for the four or five stages depending on how you characterize the very beginning are define, which is to define your topic, then discover, next is dream, then design, and finally, destiny.

Well, "dream" and "destiny" are woo woo, words that we don't use in organizations very much.

Fortunately, I'd had a learner in one of my classes who was a consultant in Canada, and she dreamed up the four Is or four stages rather than discover, dream, design, and destiny, and I won't be able to recite those to you right now, but they were essentially had the same meanings. They were many harderedged organizational words.

One of the areas of pushback is the language of Appreciative Inquiry. One of the things that Cooperrider says is that words are so important; the words we use have different... People have different reactions to two words that essentially mean the same thing. So I think I have to be careful when I change those four stages to different words and believe that I'm honoring his original intentions.

Words are one thing. The second thing is, there are lots and lots and lots and lots of people in organizations who believe that you should find the culprit, beat the culprit to a pulp, go about something new.

I don't mean to be too cute about that, but what I'm saying is that the process is to really go looking for what's wrong, then do a root cause analysis, which is how did it go wrong, and what's really wrong, even though the presenting symptom may not be the whole thing, then design some sort of solution, or brainstorm about possible solutions, and then design an action plan.

When I tell people that there's another way to do that and that we may end up in a better place, some people just don't believe it. They don't want to consider it; they don't believe it, because they believe that problem-solving works for them. I don't doubt it. I mean; I would never say it didn’t.

I just did a brief introduction to Appreciative Inquiry from my own website, and I said problem-solving works if there's something very specific that's wrong, but if it's a negative culture, for instance, in an

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organization, where do you start? I mean, what do you fix? Appreciative Inquiry really, really is, I think, a better way to approach systemic issues.

Joe: I think it's an interesting approach, because even the epitome of Lean culture, is Toyota, and I've heard that they're starting to do work in Appreciative Inquiry as far as their policy deployment.

Sara: Well, I think Toyota has been such a well-respected company until the last two years. And in the last two years, they've stumbled in important areas. So another piece of that Appreciative Inquiry is if you're running a company and running it the way you've been running it works for you, why should you change? But if you're running a company and there are big "whoops," most of us then are willing to look at everything that might make the company... or, get the company back on track.

And I think Appreciative Inquiry is one of those things that can do that when, as I say, when the issues are systemic. And I think in Toyota's case that may be a good description.

Joe: One thing you mentioned there that I thought was interesting is using appreciative work in sales.

Sara: Yes. Joe: Can you summarize that for me or talk a little bit about that for me?

Sara: Sure. I have been a salesperson, and I was a retail stockbroker for seven years, and I believe, and there are a couple of people that I know right now who are using either asset-based thinking, which is an aligned method to Appreciative Inquiry, or who are using Appreciative Inquiry or positive psychology in sales training and sales coaching. I think the reason that it can work where other methods might not be that if you want to have an underperformer, usually that underperformer, because of the way sales is, you know, there are charts on all the walls, everybody knows who the underperformers are, and everybody knows who the high-performers are because that's part of the competition of sales that most organizations set up.

If you've got an underperformer, he or she knows that she's underperforming and to begin a sales coaching relationship with what do you do really well usually throws people off guard because they think they're there to be whipped into shape.

My feeling is if you build on what that person already does well they're much more likely to be high performers than if you say you have to make 35 cold calls a day and you have to go out and see seven people live every day, and you have to use this “can� sales pitch.

Really good salespeople are not all the same. I worked in an office where one of the most introverted people I ever knew was really successful stockbroker because he figured out how to make his strengths, which were analysis and strategy, work.

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He figured out how to get the kind of support he needed in an extrovert, which was usually his assistant, to bring in customers. If you figure out what you do really well and build on that, you're much more likely to be a good salesperson.

Joe: I think that is interesting. I think two things that you hit upon there that I think is important in today's world is the one concept that we should always look at our customers being our teacher and learn from them. We shouldn't expect all these wonderful things with features and benefits to be the customer's aha moment. It's when we understand how to apply our product with the customer should be the aha moment. I think that lends itself to Appreciative Inquiry because you're seeking his input, what he's doing well, and how you can interact from that perspective. I think the other side of it is I look at Zappos as a good example.

In the short time, they came through the process and got purchased by Amazon for a billion dollars it was more about, not scripts, not how to handle people in the call centers; it was more about taking interest on who was on the other side of the phone.

Sara: But then tailoring your advertising to their preferences. If I bought four pair of four-inch stiletto heels, Zappos is going to tell me when they have a sale on stilettos. The sales algorithms are so interesting. My son-in-law is working in that area at 3M. It's a little scary what organizations know about us. It's more than a little scary.

Joe: I know that. I've seen some of the back ends of those systems. You know how many cats they own, how many dogs they own. It is scary.

In the sales perspective, it is a different approach to take an appreciative look. You're not the person with all the answers anymore. Your organization doesn't have all the answers. It's more of that community that co-creation process. I go back to value in use and enabling use of your product. You have to work with your customer, and in order to enable us, you have to play to his strengths a little bit.

Sara: You have to play to his strengths, and you have to use your own strengths in the strategy of how to engage him. The reason I say that is I am in full agreement with you that it's all about the customer.

The example I use, if I'm an extreme introvert and the idea of making a cold call makes me sweat, or it makes me want to hide under the covers or whatever, then I'm not going to do that kind of solicitation.

I'm not going to build my business that way. I need somebody who loves to engage people in that way.

On the other hand, I may be a really deep thinker, and so when I have engaged the customer, I'm willing to ask the right questions to really determine what that person needs or wants. All I'm saying is it's a combination of the salesperson leveraging his or her best strengths with the necessary skill of listening for what the customer wants and being able to apply what you know to that need.

Joe: You have a couple of things on your website. It's SaraOrem.com. Could you tell me a little bit about your DVDs and the Coaches Guide that you have available?

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Sara: Sure. I did the DVDs because when I would do teleclasses, which I haven't done in quite a while, I always would do a demonstration for the last class, and the people who came to my teleclasses were mostly coaches and many of them would say, "I really need to see what this looks like." One of the two DVDs is me with two very different kinds of coaching clients going through a whole appreciative process so that people can look at that DVD and say, "Ah, now I see how it's done." It's a case of reading about something. You can read about how to do it in the book that I wrote with Jackie Binkert, and Ann Clancy and both Jackie and Ann are masterful coaches. I think some of us, even really good coaches if you're using a new method, you need to see what that looks like. So that's one of the two DVDs. The other one is a more in-depth introduction to Appreciative Inquiry. I'm putting up today; I think - well, certainly within the next week - I'm putting up another presentation of a brief introduction to Appreciative Inquiry, and that will probably replace my teleclasses. So the DVD is a much more indepth introduction to Appreciative Inquiry. So those are the two DVDs. You can buy them separately or together.

The Coaches Handbook is available on Amazon - I think I looked yesterday - for $96, and I'm offering it for $15, so that's quite a reduction in price. I wrote that with another coach from the Kramer Institute.

And Kathy Kramer writes about and created something called asset-based thinking. And asset-based thinking is the opposite of deficit-based thinking.

So it is a way, again, a way of looking at the world that's very aligned with Appreciative Inquiry, and that book is specifically for coaches. It's a workbook. So there's a brief introduction to asset-based thinking and a brief introduction to Appreciative Inquiry, and then lots of questions and short scenarios for coaches about how to use either or both of those processes in their coaching relationship.

Joe: Is there something I didn't ask that you would like to add to this conversation?

Sara: In working with this topic that you and I have talked about this morning, so recently, in redeveloping this presentation for my website, Joe, I believe so strongly that this can help us to make - and make is a word that comes from a communications process, not from Appreciative Inquiry - but it helps us make different kinds of relationships. I think that that is significant in all of our lives. I think all of us want to have effective relationships. I mean relationships with our boss, I mean relationships with the processes that we do at work, I mean relationships with our children. And this is really a way of being in the world. Cooperrider describes this as a philosophy, not a method. It really does guide us in the way of being. That's pretty grandiose of me to say, and I also believe it.

Joe: I would like to thank you very much for participating in this podcast. What's the best way to get a hold of you?

Sara: Through my website, which is www.SaraOrem.com. I believe that there is a phone number on the website that is 510 459-0239, and there are other ways to connect which, again, are on my website.

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Mastering Positive Change Guest was Sarah Lewis Sarah Lewis is the Managing Director of Appreciating Change; a psychological change consultancy focused on helping leaders and managers achieve positive change in their organizations. Appreciating Change specializes in using rapid response change methodologies. With over 25 years’ experience of helping individuals and organizations change, she regularly presents at National Conferences and publishes in magazines.

Appreciating Change is a business psychology consultancy specializing in helping organizations to achieve sustainable change.

Working closely with the client to ensure partnership and ownership, we bring expertise in psychology and in social change methodologies such as Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, and World Café. All of these approaches help reduce resistance to change and the need to create ‘buy-in,’ rather people co-create the change of which they will be part. Recent clients include Aston Business School, Kronos, DeBeers, Vectoraerospace and Buckingham County Council.

This year we have begun offering a series of Masterclass workshops to give people the chance to learn directly from Sarah's experience in the field of Positive Psychology and particularly the use of Appreciative Inquiry in the workplace. These run every 3 months and alternate between a Masterclass aimed at fellow practitioners, which is tailored to those who have some experience and understanding of the theory behind organizational change already, and a Masterclass aimed at leaders in organizations which is more aimed at helping them use this learning in their management of the organization.

Joe Dager: Welcome everyone, This is Joe Dager, the host of Business901 podcast. With me, today is Sarah Lewis. She's the managing director of Appreciating Change; a psychological change consultancy focused on helping leaders and managers achieve positive change in their organizations. Her most recent book is "Positive Psychology at Work," and the work that I am most familiar with is the book "Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management." Sarah, I would like to welcome you. I have to add "AI for Change Management" in such a short time has become one of my most referenced books. Could you give me a short introduction to the book and yourself?

Sarah Lewis: I'd be delighted to. Thank you, Joe. The book is a distillation really of 10 or more years of working with appreciative inquiry and training people to use this approach, realizing that there were Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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certain things that people asked time and time again and were interested in understanding more about.

I thought it would be a good idea to try to put it all down in writing to make it accessible to people. I was very lucky to be helped by my colleagues Jonathan and Stefan, who coauthored the book with me.

For myself, I've been working in an appreciative way based on appreciative inquiry approaches from about 1993, when I was introduced to this way of working through an institute here. It has just transformed my practice and also actually my experience of the world. It's a very powerful approach I find.

Joe: Well, what prompted your new book, "Positive Psychology at Work"? Does it cover a broader spectrum of AI, or does it zero down into it?

Sarah: They're two separate strands. Appreciative inquiry, as you will know from your reading, was developed by David Cooperrider in the States, from Case Western University through his work there.

Recently, separately and in the psychology world, Martin Seligman, 10 or 12 years ago now, started becoming interested in what's the difference between naught and plus five, as it were, in human flourishing, human wellbeing, happiness, lives well lived. What's the difference between being OK and really thriving?

Psychology has spent a lot of time looking at the difference between minus five and zero, so examining mental ill health, failure to thrive, unhappy people, and different times. We've learned a lot about how to get people back to a good enough point. But Martin Seligman started becoming interested in what makes people exceptional and can we learn from that?

So it seemed to me that there was a real match between these two approaches and that almost appreciative inquiry was the organizational arm of positive psychology. I wanted to explore what happens if you bring these two approaches together.

What does it mean for leaders and managers in organizations? How can they benefit from this exciting research in this area of positive psychology in a practical and pragmatic way, so that they can make a difference in their own organizations?

Joe: Why is positive psychology important to an organization?

Sarah: Essentially, organizations spend a lot of time focusing on what goes wrong in an attempt to prevent it from happening again. Very reasonable, clearly we need to learn from mistakes and failures and find out how to prevent them from reoccurring. The issue is that if you study mistakes, failures, and things that aren't working, what you learn about is them. What you don't necessarily learn about is what makes success.

One of the things we're realizing is that if you study your organization from the perspective of when are people working at their best, what are the most successful things that we're doing? When do people

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feel really great here? What engages people about their work? What do people find motivating, what are the values that hold us together? These kinds of things you learn about the factors for success.

Interestingly, some of the research that's been done, again, by an American academic Ken Cameron, who has studied the best of the organizations. Those that are very productive, very profitable and great places to work he calls flourishing organizations.

It's clear that they do a thing qualitatively different from other organizations. It's not just more of the same. They do things differently.

Joe: In doing things differently, I'm going to assume from the conversation, is taking more of a positive approach, right?

Sarah: Well, there are three key elements. One definitely is this positive approach. We call that an affirmative bias. Within the organization, they're always looking to affirm the best of what they do, to affirm that the strengths, skills, and abilities that their people bring, to look to the best of what they're able to do and build on that. Also, they have a tendency to be interested in the exceptionally good, as the positive deviance in the organization. So rather than just ignoring when someone does better than everyone else as some strange anomaly -- "Well, that's just so-and-so, or that's just so-and-so's team, they just got lucky," -- they're much more interested in finding out what happened.

"Well, what is she doing in her department that's allowing her to get these particularly good results?

Can we learn from the best of our range of activities?"

So they put in much energy into that as they do to examine where things might be not quite up to scratch. And then the third thing and this is very interesting, I think, and very much relates to some other research in positive psychology about emotions.

So something else they found out about the most flourishing organizations is that they demonstrate a lot of what you might call "the virtues." Like compassion and forgiveness, and interest, and support, and humility. And just words that aren't always associated with organizational life.

Joe: I find that quite interesting because it really is a deeper dive from Appreciative Inquiry.

Sarah: Yes, absolutely. Appreciative Inquiry, one of the main principles that it's built on is this principle of positivity, which essentially says "change takes energy." And the energy that comes from positive emotions is much more sustainable as a support for change than the energy that comes from what you might call negative emotions. Particularly fear is often used in organizations to try to promote change.

Fear, anger those sorts of emotions are important. They produce a short burst of energy to change something. Whereas things like hope, optimism, passion, excitement, joy, or interest, these emotions, these positive emotions, create a much more sustainable movement forward for change.

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So Appreciative Inquiry has always recognized this importance of positive emotions to help organizations, and as part of organizational life, particularly around change. And the more research that is done into positive emotions through the positive psychology field, the more apparent it becomes what an asset that is, both to us in our own lives, and to organizations.

The huge difference it makes. You may have come across Shawn Achor's work. He's done some fantastic broadcasts on TED and so on, who's really coined it. And said, "You know what we're realizing now? Is that happiness causes success? Not success causes happiness. That when we're able to develop more positive emotional states for ourselves as individuals and in our organizations, then we do better." That is very exciting, I think.

Joe: Well, I think it is. But to frame that and to look at it from another context, I grew up in a world of fixing problems. I went out and looked for problems to fix. Boy, that's a change for me. I'm thinking as I observe something when I'm listening to someone talking, and I'm looking for problems. I'm looking at how I can help someone. What you're saying, I shouldn't be looking for the problems. I should be helping someone expand on the positives. But it's easy to say it. It's difficult to do, I think.

Sarah: It's interesting. You're absolutely right. No one's saying it's an either/or kind of situation. We still need to continue to solve problems, and we solve problems extremely well. As organisms and biological organisms, human beings are very good problem solvers. It stands us in good stead. But sometimes we try to apply that skill where it doesn't produce the goods, particularly in social situations. So working with teams, perhaps people who have fallen into conflict. That kind of thing. Problem-solving doesn't always move us forward. So there are two elements that I want to sort of highlight here.

One is that I think David Cooperrider came up with a fantastic expression when he said in one of his writings, "Every problem is the expression of a frustrated dream. If we didn't have a sense of how things could be, we wouldn't know that anything was wrong." Which I think is a brilliant insight.

Clearly, when we're talking about a problem, we're actually also expressing our sense that things could or should be different. Part of what Appreciative Inquiry does is it says, "Well, if talking about this, whatever it is, as a problem, isn't solving it, isn't moving it forward, why don't we talk about the other end of that equation. Start imagining how things could be if we build upon the best of what we do have.

"If we focused on what is working around this problem area. Built more than and grew more of that.

How might the world be? That was a very liberating and shifting effect for a group of people in various ways."

The other point that you raised is very important is about how we do train our brains. And evolutionary speaking, it's important for us to spot danger, problems, things that aren't working. So we're very oriented towards doing that.

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Our work life encourages us to do that even more. Particularly people, quality inspectors, accountants, people like this, whose whole life is made up of trying to spot what's going wrong. That part of their brain becomes very well developed.

What we don't necessarily spend so much time is developing appreciative abilities. So our critical abilities tend to be very well developed by the time we're sort of in adulthood. But our appreciative abilities, our appreciative eyes, and ears, and judgment, and intelligence tend to be underdeveloped.

Therefore, for a lot of people, it does feel very odd. These parts of their brain are not as well developed.

They're not as skilled at doing this.

Joe: You talk about fast and efficient when you talk about positive change and appreciative inquiry.

What makes it fast and efficient?

Sarah: That's a very good question. To understand that we have to contrast it with the dominant model of change, this is the idea that change is a huge plan. In most people's minds when they're thinking about organization or change it's about a small group get together, they decide what the strategy is, they maybe gather some data as well, and they pull together a plan or perhaps create a vision, that kind of thing, and then they go out to the rest of the organization and try to sell their vision of the future and their understanding of the best way to get there to everybody else in the organization. That takes a huge amount of time because they're pushing their ideas into the rest of the organization, and you'll be familiar with the expression we've got to get buy-in. Obviously, if they're trying to get someone to bu, that must mean they're selling. The other one is we're going to meet resistance here. People don't like change; we're going to meet resistance. You hear all that. That's our default normal way of dealing with change.

What appreciative inquiry and the other transformational, collaborative approaches to change do is turn all of that on its head, and they say let's start with a large group, let's start with everyone who's going to be part of this change one way, or another, everyone who's going to be affected by this as best we can.

The whole system, but you can't always get quite the whole system.

As best we can the whole system that's part of whatever it is we're talking about and let's together, first of all, understand what we've got to build on, which is the discovery part of the appreciative inquiry process, and then imagine using that, building on that, how we want our organization to be, which is the dream part of the AI process. Then realize how we've got to be now to move in that direction, which is the design part.

Then the delivering part is what are we going to go away after our congress together today and do to make this happen. What you get is a lot of people co-creating both an understanding of the situation and also some ideas for what the future could hold and some shared clarity, some shared common ground about how things need to be different now to help move towards a good future.

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People are getting by overcoming resistance and all of that because people's voices have been present in the process of creation, so they own it. It's the secret of participation, really, done in a particular way.

Because of the way appreciative inquiry works, very much creating positive emotion and a positive pull towards the future, people are motivated to go away and do things to make these futures happen.

In that sense, it's very fast, and it's very effective.

Joe: Could you touch upon the SOAR framework instead of using the SWOT analysis. That's a positive approach of looking at the present situation.

Sarah: SOAR was developed by Jackie Stavros and others as a way to apply appreciative inquiry to the strategic challenge. Generally speaking, in appreciative inquiry we don't go investigating, for instance in this context, threats, and weaknesses because the more we talk about them, the bigger they get in our minds, as it were, and if we can't do anything about them, it just depresses everybody. If we work on what are our strengths, what are the opportunities, what aspirations do we have for the organization, building on those, and how do we know if we're making progress, i.e., results, people are able to stay in a much more positive frame. Remembering always that as we said before it's not that we're ignoring difficult things it's that we're talking about them differently and therefore are allowing different things to happen.

I've used SOAR with a few different organizations, and it works really well. If there's an issue that has to come up, of course, it will come up. We work within the context of that conversation to try and reframe that in a way that is going to help us do something with it, to reframe it in a positive way. Which is a bit about what you were saying when you were listening in your meetings developing that ability to think?

Where are the positives in all of this?

What can I ask that will allow people to see that there is something good here? For instance, if someone's talking about a weakness or a threat, it might be what do we have that's going to help us with that? What do we have that might ameliorate that? If we thought about this as an opportunity rather than a weakness, how would we be acting differently?

It's just something about moving away from the standard conversation where you run into these buffers of depressing conversation.

Joe: We talk especially in Lean terms, you always hear the five whys. Why, why, why, and stuff. Is there an alternative in positive psychology to the five whys?

Sarah: Again, I would say there's nothing wrong with the five whys if you're in a rational, analytical, logical problem-solving place, and you get to the root cause. If you're dealing with an engineering problem that may be very appropriate. The challenge arises when people try to take that way of thinking into something like a social situation, because people are, as we know very emotional and creative entities. We're not just rational, logical thinkers. We also have an emotional life, the imaginative life, an interior life,social life, all sorts of things.

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We are very capable of cutting off our noses to spite our face, putting our emotions before our logical and rational analysis. When it's all very emotion-free, and it's nothing to do with relationships particularly, and it's a mechanical problem, then I think the five Y's probably works extremely well.

It's when you take that and try and apply that to something like a team not functioning terribly well or a relationship not functioning terribly well, or low morale in an organization; it just doesn't tend to produce useful answers.

Joe: I have to mention that Derek Lusk was talking to me about AI on Twitter. Appreciative inquiry is the dissertation topic that he's working on. I asked him what question he would have of you. He said that appreciative inquiry seeks to change norms, values, policies, ideals. He wanted to know how AI is affected by an increasingly diverse employee population; if that's changing the way we use AI. Sarah: It's interesting. First of all, I think the appreciative inquiry is incredibly scalable. So he's absolutely right. In the broadest terms when you want to use it at an organizational level, those are very much the cultural things that you're trying to change. You can also use it at a team level, and you can use it in coaching. But to go back to your key question, the diversity of the workforce is absolutely what appreciative inquiry thrives on. Appreciative inquiry regards the organization as a socially constructed phenomenon, i.e., it is constructed by the people in the organization.

The patterns of relationship, conversation, and interaction that people exhibit in the organization are really what make it an organization, our patterns of relationships. I sometimes say that we talk our organization into existence every day, by the way, we behave with each other.

We're looking for how to better help the organization best respond to the changes in the environment, to spot the opportunities that are coming up for the organization to grow, to respond to changes in the organization that might threaten its survival and so on. The more diversity we have in terms of different people's understandings of the world, perceptions of the world, experiences of the world, conceptions of the future and so on, the more possible, the more resource we have within the system for it to find a useful way forward.

So diversity is actually a real asset for appreciative inquiry and what we have to do with that, of course, is create sufficient commonality amongst the people who are part of the system that they are able to move forward together. And commonality is not the same as consensus.

People don't have to have exactly the same views and opinions and share exactly the same things. There has to be sufficient commonality, as I sometimes say, to allow for conjoint action, i.e., an action that is reasonably coordinated with other people.

Again this can stand in contrast to other ways of working with organizations that look to eliminate diversity and wants consensus, and there is one true path, there is the only way to think about, talk about, act within our organization. They do run into more difficulties when they need to adapt because it's hard for people who have alternatives to find a voice in those organizations.

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When we work with the appreciative inquiry, we are interested in all voices because we don't know where possibilities that may help the organization find a good use for a productive way forward. We don't know where those possibilities might lie.

Joe: I think what appreciative inquiry lends itself to is more of that designer type look. It looks at more a holistic solution, looking at the system as a whole, and that you don't necessarily just draw out different solutions, you keep them, and you evolve to a solution, rather than pick a solution and lead with it. Is that fair to say that?

Sarah: Oh, absolutely, because it's all about this kind of co-creation. So people are coming together to co-create ways forward, and the resources that are used with appreciative inquiry are to do with imagination and possibility and past experience and the diversity of skills and knowledge that people in the organization have. So you want to get a good range of possibilities so you can start finding good solutions and good ways forward.

Joe: In your experience, what are the main problems leaders run into when trying to achieve change like this?

Sarah: That's a very good question because leaders do have to understand their organization, their role in the organization, and change differently to get the best out of these approaches. So, first of all, they have to understand that the organization is a living social system and that they can't control it in that sense. It's self-organizing, it's made up of individuals who are essentially free agents that may be on the payroll, etc., etc. So the illusion that the leader controls the organization is one thing they have to give up. Another one they have to give up is the idea that they know everything that they actually understand the organization better than anybody else because they are at the top of the structure.

That's not necessarily the case either. That's an illusion that they need to give up to be able to give suitable credence to other people's account of how the organization is.

So there are lots of things about understanding an organization differently. The leader in an appreciative inquiry kind of approach is one amongst many in a privileged position. So they are one voice amongst many; they are able to set some of the contexts. They have particular privileges, so they can say we have a limited budget for whatever we come up with, or it needs to be in these kinds of broad parameters.

But what they are doing is they are, in an appreciative way, is they are calling on the collective intelligence of the organization. This is where it starts to become hugely liberating for leaders. There are two things; one is they don't have to work it out all themselves. There are, however, many brains that are in the organization who can apply themselves to the challenge with as much information as each of them have.

Joe: Well, you lead to a very good point. I forget which book I was listening to, the person said is that you are not the smartest person in the room; the room is the smartest person.

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Sarah: Well, obviously they said that. In much fewer words, that's pretty much the point I was trying to make. So for the leader, they don't have to solve it all, and they don't have to have all the answers.

That's the same thing really. But the main thing is they don't have to have the answer. What they have to have faith in is the fact that the smart room, the room as a whole, the system will find a way forward if given the right conditions.

Joe: One of the things I used in a recent workshop that I got for your book, AI for Change Management, was using reflecting teams. Could you describe that a little bit to me and expand on it a little?

Sarah: There are different ways of using reflecting teams. What it does is it puts the team that's in the reflecting space into what I would call listening position. Often this is done in what they call a goldfish bowl process. Some people will be in a group talking, and other people will be around them listening.

You might have a senior team who are discussing their understanding of the situation, the broader situation that the organization is responding to, and some of their initial thoughts at the moment about how the organization might act. They might have a selection of people from around the organization who are listening. The people outside don't have to respond to anything that they hear the senior managers say; they are just there to listen. After a while you would ask the audience, what has been the audience to get into small groups and give them some questions to consider, what did they found most helpful about, what their board have got to say, and what have they noticed about what they are attending to, what other things do they think are important for the board to attend to in its decisions and I don't know, whatever, some questions.

Then the board members can either be situated each in a group or just wander around from one group to another. But again they are not there to have to answer to anything that they hear. When people are put in a position where they don't have to respond to what's being said, they hear so much more because they don't have to have a defense, have an answer, have a comeback, have a rationale to bring to something that somebody has said.

They can just let it sort of sink in a bit more and hear things that they don't hear when they are in that normal conversational space.

Joe: I think that's the interesting part that I found out about it is how much more you hear when you are not sitting there trying to determine your response.

Sarah: Absolutely. The hearing sinks in deeper because you can hear it. It has more impact. Something that somebody would have rejected out of hand if they had had to defend it, they are able to allow it enough room to have influence.

Joe: In your book, you discuss Open Space and World Cafe. Could you just briefly describe the two methods.

Sarah: Yes. I'll start with Open Space, which is again a very powerful methodology that I use more and more with groups where I can. Essentially it's a way of allowing a group to set their own agenda around Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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a topic for what are the important things that need to be spoken about, discussed in some way and then just trying to structure for doing that. So very broadly it would need to be some business critical issue that needs discussion and maybe decision making, and then you bring the system to that issue that is relevant to it. And after some preliminaries, you essentially ask everybody who is there to put forward what they think needs are talking about, what the questions are, what they wanted to discuss, what options they want to explore or whatever. Then you can start the rest of the day from that.

So, you'd have a number of rooms, and you'd allocate a number of discussions to each of the rooms. The person who's raised the topic is the host for that discussion. Then, people attend the discussions that they're interested in.

This is just so powerful, compared to many day-long meetings I have been asked to facilitate, where basically, we have an agenda, and it starts at nine, and it finishes at five, and everyone has to attend to every item, whether they're interested in it or not, whether it's relevant to them or not.

When people are allowed to go where they are interested, and where they are connected to the topic, they feel connected to the topic; they just have; it's just, again, it's so much faster and more effective.

Joe: Before we go into World Cafe, can you use Open Space internally within an organization? People could gather and have, just a block of time that they could attend the meetings that they felt important to them. I mean that sounds like a facilitated thing at a conference or things like that, but can that really work within an organization?

Sarah: I can't say I've heard of it. But I see no reason why it shouldn't, why one shouldn't be able to develop an organization that works much more on Open Space principles for its meetings and discussions. I have to say, one of the great benefits of not being part of a larger organization is I don't spend a lot of time in meetings, except when we're there because people want to talk about whatever it is I'm there for if you see what I mean.

Joe: Sure, sure.

Sarah: So, I don't have to sit through those interminable meetings, where I'm just waiting to get to my item. We know that hours and hours of people's time can be wasted when they're in meetings, not sure why they're there, not sure what they're supposed to be contributing or taking away. But because someones told them they have to be there.

Joe: Go on and explain the World Cafe a little bit.

Sarah: World Cafe, I think, is a methodology that's really good for very exploratory conversations.

Essentially, all of these are ways of people having conversations in conversational group size, simultaneously, so you can 20, 50, and 100 people, but only working groups of six or 8. Then, have those conversations connected. In World Cafe, people start at cafe tables. The idea is that people talk to each

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other in a much more relaxed way when they're in a more relaxed atmosphere. It was a bit of intent to recreate a cafe atmosphere.

There are different ways you can do it. But essentially, let's just say you have different questions on different tables around the key topic, whatever that might be. And I start off at table A, and we have a discussion there around the question on that table. And then, one person stays at that table, after about 40 minutes or an hour, and then, the rest of us move off to a different table to address a different question.

You have the continuity around the particular question over two or three rounds, maintained by the person who stays at the table. But lots of connectivity as different people disperse to different tables if you can see this.

It's difficult to explain it just in the imagination, but different people disbursed to different tables and joined in the conversation there. So the person that has remained from the previous round will bring everybody up to speed on where we've got to, what's been mentioned so far in relation to this question.

Then just start another discussion.

Again, it's a way of having lots of things happening simultaneously and people being able to connect to two or three different questions that interest them during the course of the afternoon or the day.

Joe: I think there were two that were very interesting concepts. Have you continued to expand on them? Are you still using them, those two concepts?

Sarah: Definitely, I still use them. Increasingly for me, I suppose; appreciative inquiry is the overarching approach, methodology, philosophy or way of life, to be honest, for me now. When I'm designing interventions for organizations to help them move forward in whatever particular area it is, that's my overarching frame. Within that, I may well bring in World Cafe and Open Space as part of the process of appreciative inquiry.

I've also expanded it into manufacturing organizations particularly. There's a process called SimuReal, which is again a large system and much more similar to the lean type thing, but again, socially organized.

It's a system where you bring the whole system into the room. Then you simulate the process in the organization. With manufacturing organizations particularly that tend to be very geographically disbursed, so they're over big sites. Secondly, people are very bound to their bit of the process.

Being away from your workbench is regarded with suspicion because they want people on the line or the bench. So people don't understand what impact their action has further down the line. It's known as the silo mentality. I'm sure you've heard the expression.

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If you're able to get the whole system in the room, then you can run a simulation, over two or three months, of something like an order going through the system. With people making the decisions that they do in their own context that looks sensible and seem to solve a problem.

Someone might say, "Well, we haven't got quite the right number of bits for this order that's coming through of ZY, but I know that AB will fit just as well as ZY. So let's take a couple of these ABs and put them in the box, and I'll write it up afterward."

In no time at all, nobody knows where anything is, nothing is where it is supposed to be. The computer is sending out messages. The ERP system is sending out messages that no one can fulfill. I find that works really well, as well.

Anything where you get the whole system together so that they can see what they're doing, it's just tremendously powerful.

Joe: It sounds very interesting. It sounds like a good thing for me to do Monday at a meeting I'm going to.

Sarah: It takes a bit of setting up, I have to say.

Joe: How do you typically introduce AI or start an engagement with someone?

Sarah: This, again, is one of the reasons why I wrote the book because it's a question that gets asked so often. I guess there are a couple of principles. One is you always have to start where your organization is at. People rarely, although increasingly, rarely come saying. "What we want is an appreciative inquiry intervention," or "What we want is a strengths-based way of working." They usually come saying, "We've got this problem. Can you help us?" That's your invitation to start having a discussion about telling me how life will be when this problem is solved. Or how things would be if you didn't have this problem. Or, what is it that you actually want more of? I can see you want less of whatever the problem is, what would you like more of?

That's a way of starting to get to talk about it. You don't necessarily have to say what we're doing is appreciative inquiry. You just start working with them in an appreciative way. Then how much of the software, as it were, that you explain to the people you're working with depends on what feels appropriate.

Some of the languages are not easy for people if they've never come across it before. Somebody very wise said, "If you want to be able to work with people, you have to be sufficiently similar not to be frightening, but sufficiently different to be able to add value." I think that's the balance you're always trying to find when you're negotiating a new piece of work with someone.

If their whole language is around the organization as a machine and problems and error, and they've never heard the word passion or excitement in an organizational context, and you come in talking about Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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what gives life to the organization and positive core and an appreciation, you may be too alien for them to be able to think that you can add any value.

You have to moderate how you join with the organization so that, as I say; you seem sufficiently familiar and yet sufficiently different. Does that help?

Joe: I think that was brilliant. When we go through these things we always think that we're going to be the change agent, we jump into it and everything. About 10 minutes into it, you look at all these glassy eyes looking at you. It's really starting with the current state. Your journey of a mile starts with one step.

Sarah: They also already have a solution in mind. This is part of the issue. They'll come to you saying, "Can you help us?" and then they say, "What we think we need is...", so you need to start with that. I've found organizations say we're going to issue a survey or something. OK, well, tell me a bit about the survey. I wonder if we can just add a couple more questions in there. You're not dismissing what they've already done, but you're beginning to make it a little bit more appreciative. Wouldn't it be good if we asked people a couple of questions about what they enjoy about working here, what they think is working? Typically the whole survey will be about what's wrong with the organization.

You've got lots of ways of just starting to bring the appreciative parts in and then building on it from there.

Joe: You run a master class workshop every three months. Could you tell me about it?

Sarah: Yes. We just started doing that this year, so we ran the first one specifically for external change agents, as it were; Consultants, facilitators, trainers, that sort of thing. What I try to do is for them to bring together some of the most recent research and learning in this area, and we play around with how would you introduce this into the organization through workshops yourself? It's really training the trainers I suppose, upskilling people who do that sort of thing. Next week we'll be running a similar kind of workshop but aimed directly at leaders and managers which will be much more about how can you use this in your organizations? Here are some of the key findings, some of the research, some of the supporting evidence around the difference, some of the key elements of this area.

Positivity, which we talked about; feeling good, good emotions, understanding people's strengths, what distinguishes flourishing organizations, and appreciative inquiry as a methodology for bringing all of these things together in your organization. It'll be much more oriented around how do you do this in little ways. What can you do within your sphere of influence as the leader or manager to start bringing some of these things into your work area?

For some people that might be big, they might say I think I'm going to go away and think about addressing this organizational challenge from a more appreciative perspective. Someone else might be a much smaller thing like we really could use running our meetings slightly different. I run a team, and we always start with problems and maybe we should start with celebrating a few successes that have

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happened since the last time we met and taking time out to notice where people are doing well and what's going well.

Joe: If you had three pieces of advice for leaders for achieving a fast, effective, sustainable change, what would they be?

Sarah: I think one would be you don't have to do it all alone. Draw on the collective intelligence of your organization. They want to survive as much as you do; they want to help. There may be some issues in the way they've been treated in the past, but it's as important to them as it is to you that this organization continues to do well. One would be, don't feel you have to do it all alone. The second would be; humans have evolved in such a way that they need more carrot than stick to be at their best.

We over-weigh negative things and under-weigh positive things. We actually need three times as many good experiences as negative experiences to start to enter the enchanted place of creativity, connectivity, generativity, synchronicity and all the good things that help organizations to move much faster and much more efficiently.

Yes, you need to obviously keep a minimum line on things. But what most organizations need a lot more of is the good stuff pumped into them, so that positivity thing.

I think the third piece of advice, which is a much more generic one, is it's becoming increasingly clear that the leaders who are able to have the most positive impact in their organizations, whatever their style may be, the key thing is this thing about authentic leadership. Part of authentic leadership is being open and transparent in -- that's the other thing -- a managed way.

I remember some of the London Business School people said that, after all their analysis, the art of leadership boiled down to five words, which was, "Be yourself more with skill." All of those words are important, things like doing difficult things and asking for forgiveness, being humble about the fact that this is not doing it on your own. Everybody here has contributed to what we've achieved this year. Those old-fashioned in a way is being grateful.

Everybody who comes to your organization helps to create it does something that moves it forward.

There's something about allowing that side of yourself to come through to people because people do respond and emotions are very contagious, virtuous circles.

If we see people being heroic, we're more inclined to be a little bit more heroic ourselves the next time the opportunity arises. If someone is helpful, we see someone being helpful, or someone is helpful to us, we're more likely to do it to somebody else.

You can set off these virtuous circles of very positive interactions, which just have not escalated, but the virtuous circle gets bigger and bigger benefits in terms of performance and productivity in the end.

Joe: Is there something you would like to add about this topic that I didn't ask?

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Sarah: I hope what's come through is that I think we're at a very exciting time, where we're beginning to really make a shift from understanding the organization as something resembling a machine, that people need to be coerced into being part of to understanding the organization as a social construction that people need to be affirmed for being part of. What is fantastic as far as I am concerned is, I think there is a lot of ethics to do with working with organizations because you interfere with people's lives.

You need to, I think, be very careful about what you are doing and give it a good thought about the impact, the interventions you are offering are going to have on the quality of life of the people who are going to be affected.

What's really good news about these ways of working is that introducing more positive emotion into organizations and more positivity, helping them understand what people's strengths are and how to work with them, helping them to appreciate what people bring to the situation, not only is it good for an organization but it is good for individuals when we are able to experience positive emotional states, as opposed to negative emotional states.

It affects our whole body in terms of our physiology and our brain, and it's just really good for us. And over the long term, it affects things like longevity. So we have this chance to do two good things at once.

If we work using some of these exciting bits of research that are coming through from the pioneer academics who are the ones who are doing the fascinating psychology experiments that people do them and their subjects, out of which we get really useful knowledge that we can take into the workplace and start helping people and the organization be better.

Joe: How could someone contact you?

Sarah: We have our own website, www.appreciatingchange.co.uk. I have an email address, which is sarahlewis@appreciatingchange.co.uk, and we have a UK phone number, which is 0845 055 9874.

Joe: You will also be exhibiting at the CIPD annual conference in Manchester this year. What are the dates for that?

Sarah: That is November 6th to 8th. And it is in the Central Conference Hall. It's a great exhibition if you're an HR person. People do come from abroad as well, so it's quite international, and they have, the exhibition is great, there is also a conference. If anyone's got the funds for that as well, this is the highlight conference in the UK for the HR community, that’s highly recommended to.

Joe: Well, hopefully, my listeners of the podcast will stop by and say they heard about it from the Business901 podcast.

Sarah: Well that would be wonderful, and thank you so much, Joe, for creating the opportunity to share some of this good news with people. Been a pleasure.

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Lean and Rowe, Friend or Foe Guest was David Kasprzak David Kasprzak, of the popular blog, My Flexible Pencil discussed ROWE in the Business901 podcast this week. ROWE is a concept developed by Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler, co-authors of the book, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: The Results-Only Revolution. ROWE stands for the Results-Only Work Environment. It is a revolutionary new way of working that gives employees more responsibility and accountability for their work and the way they do it.

About David Kasprzak: While working as a cost & schedule analyst, I realized that the sources of either good or poor performance usually rested in the habits, practices, and mindsets of both the leadership and the led. As a result, I began to explore the “people side� of performance. On this blog, David addresses both workplace and family situations by applying ideas derived from Lean, ROWE, Project Management, Organizational Behavior, and my masters-level education in Political Science and Business Administration.

Joe Dager: Welcome, everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of Business901 podcast. With me today is David Kasprzak. David created the My Flexible Pencil blog to create a forum for discussing management excellence and the pursuit of work/life synthesis. On this blog, he addresses both workplace and family situations by applying ideas derived from Lean, Project Management, Organizational Behavior with a Master's level of education in Political Science and Business Administration. While working as a cost and scheduling analysis for the defense and government industry, David realized that the sources of either good or poor performance usually rested in the habits and practices of mindsets of both the leadership and the led. As a result, he began to explore the people side of performance.

He feels that one of the best practices for employee engagement is ROWE, and it can be combined with the best practices for operational excellence, specifically the Lean and Shingo models. David, I would like to welcome you, and though, I understand you are not affiliated with CultureRx, the company that created or is the creators of ROWE, could you tell me how you got started with ROWE, and maybe just a brief introduction of what it is?

David Kasprzak: Sure, thanks for having me on the show, first of all. I stumbled across ROWE in an MBA class, was where I first came across the concept. It was about six months after I had been trained in Lean. From the people side of Lean and the employee engagement aspects in ROWE, it seemed, wow, this is really interesting. While I finished out my MBA coursework, I had it in the back of my mind. About Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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six months ago, I received a tweet from someone whose handle was Jody Rowe, who had seen my blog and some of my thoughts that I had put up there on ROWE. I assumed this was just someone named Jody, who will make you ROWE, just like Best Buy was. Turns out it was Jody Thompson, the creator of ROWE, and she and I have had an ongoing conversation since that time about ROWE and how it fits into the Lean concept.

I brought those discussions to the Lean community and received quite a bit of engagement from some folks there who were fairly prominent, trying to bridge the gap between the two.

Joe: What prompted that engagement? What was the key, David? What popped out from the Lean perspective?

David: What popped out when I read the book that Jody wrote with her partner Cali Ressler was the idea behind efficiency in the workplace and eliminating, they call it to sludge in their book, which is called Work Sucks. But it's eliminating unnecessary meetings, eliminating things that don't add value.

They approach it from a very humanistic point of view, where people don't deserve to be wasting their time, their precious, nonrenewable time in their lives on things that don't matter. That seemed very similar to me with Lean saying, "We shouldn't be wasting the business's time, and customers' time, on things that don't matter." I saw a reinforcing dynamic between the two there that I've been exploring ever since.

Joe: Well, I think the interesting thing about Lean is you look at the process side. When you think about it, even processes are still about the people. It's still about the person. It's really what ROWE specifically addresses, because it is about the person, right?

David: Yes, it is. What I find really interesting with the two, and I know Lean purists don't like this term, but in Lean implementations, I keep seeing, and I've experienced a little bit myself where they introduce a bunch of tools. The tools get introduced, and they take hold, and you see some operating efficiencies.

You get a little bit better effectiveness. Because of that the business wants to grow, and the idea expands, and then at some hoped-for a point in the future you get to this culture change where people at all levels are really engaged and perfectly aligned. What I see in ROWE is, let's start with culture change. Let's get those people engaged and aligned.

Once we begin with what people's intrinsic motivations are wrapped around that start to see improvements in their own time and thereby, improvements in business performance that makes them want to investigate more tools for increased efficiency. It's almost like they're going in different directions. One says tools first to get to the culture. The other says culture first to get to the tools.

That to me, if the two of them, if we could find out where the common ground is and how they intertwine, you'd have something extremely powerful, because you'd get past the Lean problem with getting the culture change, and the ROWE problem with getting to increase levels of efficiency across the enterprise.

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Joe: In ROWE, it's all up to the person, and there's no supervision. Is the person just responsible for the actions?

David: I wouldn't say there's no supervision. I think there's a greater emphasis on supervision. People in the traditional workplace show up for work. You do a bunch of testings without knowing why. In ROWE, the emphasis is on "you need to know why you're doing things." Once you're aware of why you're doing things, once you understand the greater purpose and how you fit into, the greater system, the freedom to accomplish that is yours. In some ways, a "results-only work environment" might be a little misnamed. I think it's more "responsibility-only."

It stands for Results Only Work Environment. In its origins, it was called Results Oriented Work Environment, but the creators realized that wasn't strong enough. The Results-Oriented was something you could kind of do if you needed to. Results Only made it an absolute.

Joe: What are the differences between, let's say continuous improvement and ROWE? David: I think ROWE lacks a method for continuous improvement. It certainly would want it; it certainly agrees with it, having talked to, most creators were on board with that entirely. It doesn't have a prescribed method for saying this is the best way to operate your company. Whereas Lean has a lot of things that say; this is the best way to operate your company, but it doesn't have a prescribed method for creating culture change.

Joe: That's a very interesting point because that's what always frustrates me is that when people get into Lean, they just dump onto, "Oh, it's a cultural change." But hey, create this atmosphere that you have to have that you're supposed to have blind faith going there that it's going to happen. Does ROWE solve some of those problems?

David: I think it does. I think it does it in a very interesting way. I think ROWE is very much aware, and having talked with Jody directly, those folks are very much aware that businesses have a higher purpose.

We can talk mission and values, but above that is a higher purpose. I think a lot of us are familiar with the example of the gentleman sweeping the floor at NASA, and they ask, what is his job? He said, oh, I helped to launch the space shuttle. So there is NASA's mission. Their higher purpose is to put a man on the moon or win the space race, or one of those things. There's a higher purpose involved.

We're looking to get people to that higher purpose, gives them a greater ability to focus on just what they need to do to accomplish that purpose, and that's where the culture change begins. Wait a minute, if I'm at home today right now and not doing what I would otherwise be doing if I was in the office -- which might be nothing more than hanging out at the water cooler -- am I detracting from the purpose of the organization?

Or they may have worked in a daycare as well, and they believe their higher purpose is to create a greater society, and the way they create that greater society is through proper education of young children.

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If I decide to go and get my hair done today, and I don't have someone to cover for me, am I helping to achieve that higher purpose? No, clearly, you're not. However, if you're given the responsibility for making sure someone covers your time, and it does not detract from the higher purpose, then you are free to do what you feel you need to do that day.

That's why I say the responsibility only aspect of ROWE... I think there is sort of the three Rs in ROWE. These are Results Only, Responsibility Only, and Respect Only. I think if you accomplish those things; people intrinsically start to see the need for efficiency, because not only does it benefit the business, but let's face it, people want to benefit themselves, too.

Joe: So you think that ROWE can reinforce the Lean principles?

David: Absolutely, I think, because not only does it give people greater attachment to the business's purpose, but it also helps them to see. There's a little bit of what's in it for me in everything. I think people start to see, well, I can do this, and it'll benefit the business, and also I get something out of it.

What can happen in a lot of Lean implementation's great? I reduced 50 percent of my effort, and now I have 50 percent busy work to do for no real reason.

Joe: It's this feel-good strategy. I was joking a little bit before, but this seems like that 60s and 70s mentality. But here we are 40 years later, and we're talking about these feel-good strategies like appreciative inquiry, ROWE...You explained the "why" side of it, where I go back to the Simon Sinek book on why...

David: Oh, love the book.

Joe: Yes, and all these things are like catching, grabbing people. Why do you think that we see this lately?

David: There are a few things. I think for quite a long time, and I think Lean thinkers would agree, we've been stuck in the Frederick Taylor style of management, which one, hasn't worked for businesses. And two has led to the creation of the work sucks mentality. The Office is a hit show, and Office Space was a hit movie, it's still got a cult following. There's this acceptance that works sucks, and you're seeing more and more people saying it doesn't have to. Technology is now permitting a lot of what was not possible before. You can work from home nearly as seamlessly as you can work in the office, and especially in knowledge work. Your smartphone... I barely even use my desktop anymore; I love my Droid. iPhone lovers don't send me any hate mail.

Technology is creating more and more ability to do what people have always wanted to do, and that controls their time. Still be productive, still meet the needs of the organization, still accomplish the mission and purpose of their employer. You would love to have people working at a place they believe in, not just earn a paycheck from.

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But even if they don't, technology is permitting what people have always wanted. As that technology continues to grow and develop, I think they're going to see more and more societal trends towards, hey, wait a minute, my employer says I can't work from home, yet they have given me remote access and a logon ID. There's a certain amount of dissonance that happens there.

Joe: Buying into this structure, the typical hierarchy, the typical organizational structure is a failed model going forward. It's changing, and ROWE supports that thought, doesn't it?

David: I think it does. I think it's sort of a little bit both ways. You can still have a tight hierarchy, but it requires that the people who work for you have a much deeper understanding of why they are there other than; they're there to do whatever I come up with at that moment, even if I don't come up with anything at all. It leads to presenteeism. Yes, you're there, but your mind is not. Going back to Office Space, where he mentions, yes, for the first two hours of my day I just sort of zone out. I just stare at my computer. It looks like I'm working, but I'm just not.

That's an epidemic, and it's all based on the assumption that people have to show up in a specific place for a specific time regardless of what there is to do. There is any number of professions where time and location are a necessity if you have a large physical plant in manufacturing if you're a security guard.

However, ROWE is still not exactly about work where you want, when you want. That is an outcome of ROWE; much like cost savings is an outcome of Lean thinking.

Joe: I'm intrigued by the fact that this says that every person is responsible. This puts a lot of emphasis on individual responsibility, doesn't it?

David: Not so much emphasis on individual responsibility, although I don't disagree that it does. I think it puts a huge emphasis on individual intrinsic motivation. If you're a fan of Dan Pink's book Drive, I think this argument will resonate that people want to do a good job. They want to do good work. However, they intrinsically understand that doing a good job and doing good work doesn't necessitate sitting in a cubicle for eight hours a day. If you do a good job and good work in six hours, or if you do a good job, good work at Barnes & Noble where you're more able to concentrate, why not have the freedom to do those things?

In many ways, and I give several examples in the Work Sucks book where people just couldn't function in the noise and busyness of their cubicle space. If they were able to work remotely wherever remote may be, they were more able to focus, more able to concentrate, meet their deliverables, keep everyone happy, and have greater quality work products.

However, these folks were chastised, not for the quality of their work, but for their lack of presence in the office. So back to Lean thinking, what is it we value? Are we valuing the quality of the work you produce or the place in which you produce it?

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Joe: I like the sound of it, but I still have this thing is, can it work in an organizational structure? Because doesn't some of us want to be led, want to be in an environment that there's structure, even a very structured environment. This is more the free spirit, but not all of us want to be a free spirit. Do we?

David: Actually, not. I think it's an interesting twist. I think this would be some of the management challenges in a ROWE. You're going to have people of all kinds. Let me backtrack a bit. It's more about giving people the freedom to work at their best. If at your best is someplace where you could hole up and be quiet, and you like to travel, and you're able to work and meet all your deliverables, that's fine. If you work better with structure and coming into the office, that's fine. It's not up to the manager to tell you how you work best. It's up to you to decide for yourself how you work best. If you believe in intrinsic motivation, people are going to do that.

There are a number of people when you talk about ... although the ROWE people bristle at the concept of flexible work arrangement. The people in a flexible work arrangement ... a number of people say "I hate it. I'm so distracted at home. I can't get anything done." That's because you're not given the freedom to ... you're either working at home, or you're not in the flexible work arrangement. It's not a situation where you can decide for yourself where you work best.

Then you have people who are at the office while others are working at home who have a negative view of those working at home "Oh, they're just sitting on the couch doing nothing, and they're not here."

That's what the ROWE folks call sludge. It's focusing on how a person works or where they work from without any consideration for what's the quality and value of the work that they're producing.

Joe: That's where I have problems with it. What you just mentioned, the sludge part of it. I'm sitting here thinking, David, if I'm sitting in the office I'm getting all that little minutia and all that stuff that just happens. I become responsible for it, and the guy at home gets to work on the cool stuff and only what he wants to do. I struggle with that, thinking from a manager’s standpoint. Even if I believe in it, how do I balance those outlooks? That seems overwhelming to me.

David: Yes. I'll be honest. I wish I had a great answer for you because I can definitely see it as being a problem. All the buzzing in the office of... The conversations you overhear that can make a difference you don't get if you're not in the office. I think that places a big burden on management. I think that's a great question. That's something I really want to talk to ROWE people about. How do they overcome that? It is curious to me how the intangibles of the office place get filtered out or filtered into people who aren't in the office place.

Joe: Just the perception of what sales guys do. If you relate to the internal people, the internal people do all the "work." I'm a little smart-alecky here. But there is that perception that the sales guys are just out there wining and dining. What are they really doing, forming customer relationships? It seems too soft. The internal people have to do the work. To me, that is just a huge barrier for me to implement ROWE.

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David: It's curious. I think the sludge concept is really insightful. The aspect of, "The sales guys, they're out in the field, and they're just wining and dining, and running up their expense accounts." The sludge point of view on that would be, "it doesn't matter." Are they getting results? Are they closing sales? Are they bringing in revenue? Are they bringing in the revenue that they're supposed to? If they're not, that's your problem. If they're able to go out into the field, close a bunch of sales, and then enjoy the rest of their time, what's the problem?

Now, the Lean side of me bristles, and says, well, "This is nothing more than the cream rises to the top," and we ignore the systemic problems causing suboptimal results.

It says that a quota-based system is the only one that matters. Receive your quota, and you can take the rest of the week off. There are problems with it. That's why I'm out here talking about it because I don't think ROWE and Lean perfectly mesh. I can certainly see places where they don't. But I do see places where ROWE thinking reinforces Lean thinking.

Joe: I struggle with "Leader Standard Work." I think it's a good concept. It gives structure to things and gets things done. But leader standard work is about shared responsibilities. However, we can always take what the other guy should be doing and tell him. Very few of us take that individual responsibility of "this is what I should be doing; here's my standard work." Because how much standard work gets to be created by the individual, and I don't think a lot of it does.

David: I talked to Jody this morning. We hit on this a bit. That very often, managers have all kind of "command and control" constructs that they employ in very subtle ways. Where in ROWE, there's a danger of Taylor-istic style management and cream rising to the top of the fastest worker is the best worker thinking to creep in. There is a danger in Lean and standard work where it's still dad coming down to check on us. Which ROWE bristles at its core.

This is back, and forth I've seen between Lean thinking and ROWE thinking of creating standards, making sure management is engaged and leading. That they're knowledgeable about the things that they are asking people to do within coach and guide, versus paternalistic command and control, I have to check on you, and I always know better thinking, as well.

Joe: I'm going to ask a question here that I've gotten a couple of responses on LinkedIn. And it says when Lean fails it's always blamed on leadership. So, when ROWE fails, is it always blamed on leadership?

David: Good question. Well, now, you've put me on the spot. I've not been part of a ROWE implementation, but I can certainly imagine that is what would happen. I've been following your conversation on Lean failing leaders, and I think it's one of those situations where it may not be the leader's fault, but it is a leader's responsibility. There may be things in the environment. If you try to jump into ROWE or Lean too soon, the organization's not ready for it; there is this assumption, again, that the leader couldn't make it happen. But there may have been things in place where the leader was forced to go into something that the organization wasn't ready for and needed to build for.

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If ROWE fails, is it a failure of leadership? Not entirely, because there's buy-in. One of the things that they did at Best Buy I know is they allowed departments to self-select. If you want to be ROWE, we'll coach you through it. Don't want to be ROWE? They're not going to force it upon you.

If people self-select, say, yes, we want to be ROWE, and they say, well, the behaviors you need to adopt, and they don't adopt those behaviors? There is an implied assumption that leadership can somehow create that buy-in and sell the idea to people no matter what. I don't think that's entirely true in either the Lean or the ROWE case.

There may be systemic things, things in the environment preventing the adoption of a new way of thinking, and most systemic things are clearly not the leader's fault. Unfortunately, they become the leader's responsibility.

Joe: See, you stole my next question, David. It was, can you prototype this? Can you use a work cell or a group and test this, and leave it to grow on its own?

David: Interestingly enough, that's exactly what they did, as I mentioned, at Best Buy; they started with small parts of the organization and let it grow and expand, something I've talked about in green transformations. There are a couple of blogs out there looking at people's ideas. I actually came across some Ph.D. research on this that the best way to transition from traditional to Lean thinking is not by expanding the concept as quickly as possible, as most organizations do. But by deepening it in one or two areas within the organization and allowing and demanding that everything that organization touch interact in a Lean fashion.

Let's say if you're a shipping organization, happens to be the one where that department just gets Lean, they have a manager there who really understands it. OK, well then, let's say all of your assembly lines, when they bring things to shipping, they need to act in a Lean fashion and take the shipping department's lead, or anywhere else. But you create this vortex that pulls things into it, and I think in many ways that's what happened.

My understanding of what happened at Best Buy is, they had certain organizations that when others saw, wow, that ROWE thing really worked there. I want to work in that department, leaving the old one to flounder, but we need to make this department like that one. And the idea deepened in one area and then spread to others as it grew.

Joe: I was talking to one of the people at Pfizer's in product development, and we discussed the OODA loop in a previous podcast. That was his take on implementing Lean. Build these pockets of excellence, for lack of a better word, and leave them to act as a vortex and pull them in. Do you meet resistance?

Just go around it. Don't sit there and fight it. Eventually, they'll be looking from the outside in and wanting to participate if the strategy is good if the methodology's good. Leave it to grow that way, versus this command and control-type structure that we're all going to do ROWE now. We're all going to do Lean and Continuous Improvement now. I think there's a lot of merit in that.

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David: Oh, absolutely. I think there are a few things. In anything, in ROWE management, they all say worry about the people in the boat. The one in the water will either drown or want to get in the boat. I don't care what, if I told you...OK, let me ask you a question. What pocket do you put your keys in?

Joe: Probably, the left pocket.

David: Put them in the right.

Joe: Ooh, I don't know.

David: Exactly. Something as simple as where do you carry your keys, if anyone tells you how to do something differently, is your first reaction, oh yes, I'll try that out? Or is your first reaction, well, why should I do that?

Joe: Yes. Your first reaction is, OK, all right; I'll try it. But the next time you notice where you put them, they're in your left pocket.

David: Yes, I think it's a smaller percentage of people than we give credit to that, really; their first reaction is skepticism. Why should I do this? I don't want to. They're fine where they are; I don't need to change, rather than, well; I'll try it your way and see what happens. I don't think that's the normal instinctive reaction. When you're trying to create change, when you have this, we're going to be Lean now, we're going to be ROWE now, we're going to do CMMI now, we're going to do you-name-it now, business process reengineering, we're going to, whatever...The first thing people say is, OK, why are you changing this? Why do I need to change? When it becomes a "thou shalt," the first reaction from most people... From your marketing background, there is a very small percentage of people who are early adopters. Everybody else needs to be convinced.

Joe: One thing that goes with ROWE is, how does it fit into this structure of teams? Don't we do everything through a team?

David: Everything you do affects everything else you do, everyone else in a group. If you simply say to a person, here's your results, go achieve them, and once you achieve them your time is your own, ROWE comes off that way. I don't think that's entirely what it's about. I think again; ROWE is more management philosophy. If you are holding only individuals at the staff associate level to results and not managers, ROWE fails. So your manager is a person who creates the desired results for the team. That can be pretty broad. That can be, OK, produce so many widgets, get your reports done on time, participate in continuous improvement. It could be something pretty intangible. So, your manager has responsibility for bringing the team to the results that are needed for themselves, for their larger organization for their customer.

That might be that a manager gives people individual targets, and then allows them the freedom to figure out the best way to hit it, which in my mind is a lot like Lean, engaging front-line employees in

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understanding the work and determining the best way to do it. I don't think ROWE necessitates people work individually to some arbitrary quota.

Joe: ROWE is possible because of the changing structure in a virtual world. We can sit there and manage things from home. I think of the Tim Ferriss – 4-hour work week suggestions, just remove yourself and see if anyone misses you?

David: Yes. Joe: Is that the reason it works? Or does fundamentally it works just because it's what it is?

David: Yes. A little earlier I was mentioning, the first order of effective ROWE is, work where you want when you want, as long as the work gets done. In the same way, the first order of effective Lean is, hey, we lowered costs. There's more to it than that. ROWE is not at its core about work where you want when you want. That's an outcome. It's an outcome allowing people freedom, have complete freedom, and how to accomplish their work. I think one of the things where ROWE is a little weak and needs some strengthening is understanding the Lean aspects of leaders as coaches and mentors and not as controllers. I think if you have a ROWE environment within Lean, I think you've got something really powerful there. Because it gives the aspect of, you are responsible for you within the construct of this larger thing that helps get us to operational excellence.

So, it's good for you; it's good for the business. And quite frankly, if you're allowing a person to do something that’s good for them, but not good for the business, you're not achieving results.

Joe: When you bring Lean in, Lean is all about going to Gemba, which is very critical for continuous improvement. So, how you get to Gemba when you're in ROWE? Because you're saying that you can be anywhere at ROWE, but then Gemba's only in one place, isn't it?

David: Yes, I think that's a problem for any kind of remote work arrangement, whether you're a knowledge worker in ROWE, and you have complete freedom, or you're in a more traditional flex work environment. That's one that I'm struggling with is, how do you go to Gemba when a Gemba is anywhere? I've posted LinkedIn Q&As and sometimes on my blog asking that question, and it's hard to find a good answer. I think it's something folks haven't considered yet. We're at this crossroads where society alone is trending in a way to where people will work more remotely as technology develops and as we go on into the future. Yet as you say, continuous improvement says you've got to go to Gemba and see where the value was created. Well, if I'm creating value from anywhere and anywhere, what is Gemba?

Is it the way I touch the keystrokes? Is it the ergonomics I use when I sit at the table? Sure, that's a big part of it. But you certainly can't go into a person's bedroom where they're in their pajamas in bed typing on their laptop and look at the way they work.

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I guess the concept of value changes, and where value is created, the value may, in that case, be created in virtual space. How do we utilize our systems if we can't get through the firewall to access files, and we need those files to give our customer what they demand? Is that where Gemba is? We don't create value by using our IT systems efficiently.

Several people in response to that question have mentioned, as you said sales folks out in the field. They are in Gemba when they are meeting with clients. Well, bringing in somebody else to supervise the meeting or to observe it might actually kill the close. You wouldn't want to do that, but that's where value is created. So that is one of those sticking points between Lean and ROWE that I haven't fully resolved yet, and I haven't seen anybody else doing it either.

Joe: I think it goes back to probably redefining value, and whether value can be defined internally because of value really an external thing?

David: I don't know if it's redefining value. I think it's really redefining ROWE, the place where value is created. Is that still the place where work is done, meaning I'm sitting in my bedroom typing on my laptop, or is that the place where value is transferred to a customer, and now that gets into IT systems, and things like that.

Joe: We're talking about a big mind shift here and a very different way of doing it. You mentioned Best Buy. Are there other people that have been successful with ROWE? David: Yeah, there a number of organizations. Best Buy is where it's created, and it's the Goliath in that world. It's most prominent and most well-known, but they've worked with a number of companies in different industries. Most of them are fairly small. That's, I think, the norm. It's easy to create change in a green field. I believe Gap is a ROWE company. We've mentioned IT startups and software development companies that are under ROWE. There are some government agencies in Minnesota where Best Buy is headquartered and where they've spun off a company to promote ROWE, as well.

Being adopted in different industries, it hasn't hit large-scale manufacturing yet. It would be interesting to see how it works. It certainly can, because again; it's not about "work where you want when you want." It's about allowing people freedom.

It has been implemented in a number of places. If you go to the goROWE.com site, they actually have a list of companies that they have certified as ROWE companies. It includes daycare. It's pretty interesting how the change in mindset is being adopted in different places.

Joe: Is there something that maybe I didn't ask that you think should be answered about ROWE in this podcast?

David: Plug the site from the authors, goROWE.com. There's a lot of information there, and they are continuing to grow both the concept and the company. And any questions on ROWE, I would love to

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hear from people, and I will do my best to answer. If you want to go directly to the source, find Jody and Callie and their staff at goROWE.com.

Joe: I think you put a different perspective, especially from the continuous improvement side, that few others have. What's the best way to get a hold of you? Is your site myflexiblepencil.com? Is that correct?

David: That's correct. That's a good way to get a hold of me. You can find me there. You can also find me on Linked In. Between the two, you can certainly get a hold of me. Send me emails to david@myflexiblepencil.com.

Joe: I'd like to thank you very much, David, for the opportunity.

David: Oh, thank you very much. Hopefully, we'll come back in a few months and see where this idea has gone.

Joe: This podcast will be available at the Business901 blog site and also the Business901 iTunes store, so thanks again.

David: Thank you.

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Strength Based approach to Lean and Six Sigma Guest was David Shaked Joe Dager: Welcome everyone; this is Joe Dager, the host of Business901 podcast. With me, today is David Shaked of Almond-Insight. David is an experienced organizational change and business improvement leader with multinational corporations and an innovator in the application of StrengthBased approaches to change through Appreciative Inquiry, Lean, and Six Sigma. David, could you give me a quick introduction of yourself?

David Shaked: Thank you, first of all, for having for me. My name is David Shaked, and I started my own business, Almond Insight, about five years ago. Almond Insight is basically my consultancy, and I work with partners, as well. The purpose of setting it up is to do what I call Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma. Which, I'm sure we'll talk about later.

I’ve combined everything that I've accumulated in terms of tools and approaches, ways of thinking, and the work that I do into one company, one business that I can refer to and promote.

Joe: Talking about the Strength-Based approach. I have to first ask you, how did you start? Did you start as a Lean Six Sigma guy, or did you start as an Appreciative Inquiry person first?

David: I started very much in the world of Lean Six Sigma, or even beforehand Process Improvement, Process Re-Engineering. That's been most of my experience up to the point where I've discovered A.I. I had more than 10 years of working in Lean Six Sigma, and the last eight years were with a big corporation, Johnson & Johnson. I was a Master Black Belt there, which is quite a scary title. My focus was very much in the transactional area of Lean Six Sigma, anything that is outside of manufacturing. Primarily it was in sales and marketing, improving the sales process, marketing processes, a little bit on the other support functions like HR, IT, and finance.

Also, I've done a little work on the distribution side. How you take customer orders and make sure they arrive at the customer.

Joe: When you worked in transactional processes, did you work improving a certain process in sales and marketing, such as a call center and improving that process? Is that how you applied Lean Six Sigma in that area?

David: Absolutely. Also, improving the work those sales reps did on the ground, or the marketing that we do with customers because a lot of the sales we did in Johnson & Johnson was face to face rather Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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than online or through phone orders. I've done a lot of work with sales reps, with sales managers, looking at the processes that they use. A lot of these processes are human based, based on conversations, interactions. They're not as automated or standardized as, say, some of the more automated, online processes. I've done some of them, as well.

Joe: Could you pick an area and tell me how you applied Six Sigma to sales and marketing?

David: I can tell you about the very first green belt project I did, which was actually quite innovative at the time. I started with it when Six Sigma was very much associated with manufacturing. My job, when I joined Johnson & Johnson was actually to introduce Six Sigma anywhere outside the manufacturing side, and primarily in sales. The very first project was to analyze what makes a good sales call, or a sales visit with a customer, how to increase the ratio or the success rates of sales calls. So, we did the whole DMAIC cycle there, define, measure, analyze, all of that, and achieved some very interesting conclusions of what makes a good sales call, what preparations are needed.

Also, because we were looking at defects at the time, so, more analyzing what prevents a sales call from being a good sales call? Looked at, where did we go wrong in terms of the sales call itself. A lot of it was about the targeting. Whom do we target for the sales call, and why do we target them? What message are we going to communicate with them?

Joe: How did the sales and marketing people react, initially, to a Six Sigma guy and a Master Black Belt coming in there to improve their process?

David: Suspiciously, the biggest challenge at the time, looking back, I've done a good job in that is translating the language, because the language of Six Sigma is not natural to a lot of sales and marketing people. It's actually taking the language and some of the tools. A lot of salespeople believe that it's only about relationships, and it's an art. You either have it or not. A lot of it is true, but even the greatest artists in the world still have to mix their paints correctly, and there's a lot of science in that, and set up the light and everything else that comes into great paintings before they apply their artistic side.

Joe: You think about standard work a lot of times when you think about Lean. Can standard work be applied to the sales and marketing arena?

David: It can be, to a certain degree. At the end of the day, it is human interaction. It is a conversation, so there's very little you can actually control there. But in terms of your preparation, you can definitely standardize it, or standardize the process you're going through. You can standardize some of the questions you might ask, some of the content, some of the information that you have about the customer and about the products you're trying to sell. You can standardize your response to the sales call itself. There are a lot of things you can standardize. Then you realize that to be honest, there's no such thing as Six Sigma in these processes, and you're just better off moving from half a sigma to a sigma. You're already making a big difference.

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will get you to three sigma, five sigma, probably. That's plenty for sales and marketing.

David: Absolutely. There's so much variation there, and it's not so much about reducing that variation, because you actually want that richness of the conversation. But you want to standardize what you can standardize, and really base it on the best practices, rather than analyzing what the defects are.

Joe: Did you find something lacking in Lean and Six Sigma?

David: I don't think it lacked in anything. I got good results, and I have huge respect for Lean and Six Sigma. I've used it for so long, and it wasn't lacking. The only thing that I did notice after a while is that, A, you cannot apply it in every situation, and B, a lot of the stuff becomes repetitive. I would solve the problem in one area, but it would generate another problem elsewhere. Or, I would solve the problem in one area, and then, I would see the exact same problem in a different area. It became a bit repetitive after a while, and that's what kicked me towards discovering what else is out there in terms of driving change in organizations.

Joe: Is that what brought you to Appreciative Inquiry, first?

David: It did. It was a journey of discovery, but I saw myself as a change leader, as someone who leads change into individuals in teams, or in whole organizations. Once I realized that's who I am, I let go of the attachment to Lean and Six Sigma and allowed other things, and one of them was AI. I went to a workshop about AI. That was six years ago, so not too long, and that was a fabulous experience. Very deep, very interesting, very powerful, as well in terms of the insights I got out of it. At the same time, it really clashed with everything that I knew from the world of Lean and Six Sigma.

Joe: Well, it seems like Lean and Six Sigma is driven by problem-solving and looking for problems, and Appreciative Inquiry is saying, "No, no, no!" "Let's look at the good things." What do they have in common?

David: They actually do have a lot in common. In the journey that I went with AI and then, later on with other Strength-Based tools, it took me a while to be able to merge the two things. But what they do have in common is the desire for improvement. Also, if you look at some of the principles of Lean, for example, or the mission that is behind Six Sigma, the principles in Lean would like to see the flow. You would like to see value to the customer. You'd like to see pull versus push. You'd like to see continuous improvement, and Six Sigma is all about quality. All of these things that I've just said are very positive.

They're not in complete misalignment with AI. AI is also very positive oriented. What confused me initially, and what might confuse others is the language we use, or the ways we use, the approaches we use to get there. In Lean Six Sigma, I would actually analyze the defects or the wastes in order to get to value and quality.

Whereas in AI, I would actually look at where are we already creating value or where do we already have some quality? Then, build on that. If you actually look at the end result of what we are trying to Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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drive, you'll see that they're very much aligned. It's only the road we take to get there, which is different.

Joe: I relate that a somewhat to the Shainin methodology, which isn't practiced very often, but it's taken these positive things, and you don't address a lot of those Xs. You narrow things down by working with the Ys of what you want for the outcomes. Is that an approach similar to how you blend AI and Lean and Six Sigma?

David: It is. The way I blend it is very different for each situation. There are many ways to do that. Some of it is more about the thinking, the end result, what it is that we are trying to achieve here, and therefore let's focus on where it already exists. In other cases, it's just using the old familiar tools that we know, but applying AI thinking to them.

Joe: Can you expand on one of the ways that you integrate the two?

David: AI is really a whole organizational, whole system approach, which is, by the way, very aligned with Lean. So Lean would look at the whole organization, our whole process, rather than chunks of it.

How I blend, it depends on the situation. For example, if you work with a whole organization, you can start with setting up a vision of quality and efficiency, using pure AI and then implementing that with either classic Lean Six Sigma, or the Strength-Based approach, which is what I'm doing. Either way, you do it, you are driving towards a vision that is shared by everyone and is engaging with everyone because you've done it through an AI process.

Now, the vision of quality and efficiency that you're creating can be part of a bigger strategic plan, for example. We don't necessarily have to focus just on quality and efficiency, but quality and efficiency are ways to get to something else.

That was on a whole organizational level. There may be a project or a Kaizen event where you can also apply that thinking. You can use it in specific tools, for example. I often do process maps with StrengthBased thinking, or something I call a wishbone analysis, which is obviously based on the fishbone analysis.

I also do the seven signs of value, which is a tool that I've created based on the seven wastes. Lots of different ways, it really depends on the situation, but what it enabled me is a huge freedom to play with Lean Six Sigma and be creative with it.

Joe: Why would I want to combine the two? What's the advantage?

David: For me, primarily, the first thing is, what AI brings to the play is creativity, energy, innovation, and huge engagement. People always love to talk about their best experiences, the successes they had, the knowledge they already have. That's a huge contribution that AI gives. Lean Six Sigma obviously brings the methodical way of working in situations. If you combine the two of them, you're actually creating a brilliant way of solving business problems, organizational challenges, process issues, in a much Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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more engaging and creative way. I still remember when I practiced classically, Lean Six Sigma. Once you start that conversation about wastes, you're creating a threat, and you get a lot of people who are disengaged with it.

Even if I try to blame someone else or the people who designed the process originally, I still create some sort of a threat for people. It's not intentional, but just the language that is used, "wastes," or "defects," it's already threatening to anyone I engage with. They close down, and the creativity is not as great as it can be with AI. Joe: I had a Master Black Belt when I mentioned about the AI and combined it with Lean and Six Sigma and came back and said, "Oh, it's just like playing soccer and not keeping score. It's just a feel-good type thing and everything." How would you answer someone like that?

David: I get that a lot. A good Lean Six Sigma resource would be a belt or sensei or whatever it is, and I was just like that so, I'm not saying it's any different than what I was a few years ago. Lean Six Sigma people think in the way of let's find what's wasteful about anything that is in front of us or let's find what is defective about it. When you introduce AI to a Lean Six Sigma person, you will get them asking, immediately questioning what's wrong about it, rather than trying to play with the possibilities. That's the first thing. The best way to introduce it to an organization that is really keen on Lean Six Sigma is you can just as well build on what you already know and already do and just add that extra magic and energy of AI. It's not contradicting in any way it's not a threat it's actually helping the Lean Six Sigma journey get to a better level in my view.

Joe: David, could you expand on the seven signs of value and what you were trying to accomplish with it?

David: This is one of the things that I learned from AI. AI really emphasizes that what you ask, you get more of. If you start asking questions about wastes and trying to look for wastes in your system, you will find more waste, and you will possibly even create new waste. I've used the seven wastes or eight wastes, or there are so many versions of the tool, seven wastes so many different situations in the past.

Once I embarked on the journey of AI, I actually realized, wait a minute, am I actually set myself up for failure? Am I creating more waste by asking about the waste and trying to look for it?

That led me to this train of thought, which led to why don't we actually look for where is the value? In all of the Kaizen events and everything that I have done in Lean, we very rarely looked at the value. Even when we identify where value is created, we actually never even inquired how come we do it or what enables all that.

I started thinking about where is value created and how would I know that I'm creating value, and that's what led me to these seven signs of value. Which in a way it's the flipside of the seven wastes but because you started asking about them, you're generating more value. In a way, the opposite of defects, Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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which is one of the wastes, would be perfect outcomes.

Where in my process am I actually creating perfect outcomes? If you're talking about excessive movement, where in my process are things placed in a way that doesn't require that movement, that they are so close to each other that you don't need to move things around.

All of these seven wastes can be translated. I actually wrote an article about it, which is available to anyone who wants it, which specifies these seven signs of value. How to look for value and how to find it? The conversations you're having as you discovered more and more value, it's a great conversation, it's motivating, it’s engaging, and it gives people more idea on where else can they create value. Which is really what we're after when we're talking about Lean?

Joe: That's so well said because we don't go after what value we're creating so often. We're always looking for the nonvalue instead of promoting the value, and that is the Strength-Based approach, isn't it?

David: It is. I use a common metaphor if you like for that and I explain to people; it is like making a cake.

Imagine the operations that process in front of you like a cake. The Lean thinking way or the Six Sigma way would be, let's look at this cake and find the tasteless part or the things we used too much of in preparing the cake. I would look for what's not tasty, what's not useful, did I use to much flour in the process of making the cake and all of that, and by this process, I will start removing things from my cake and who knows I might actually leave it with holes.

Whereas, in my Strength-Based approach, when you apply the Strength-Based process or thinking to the cake, you will think well what's really good about this cake? What are the tasty bits, and how can I make an even tastier cake based on what I know that makes cakes tasty? I would find the raisins or the strawberries, or whatever it is I have on my cake and find how do I do more of that rather than focusing on where did I waste stuff?

Joe: The Ben and Jerry's approach to ice cream. I don't know if you're familiar with Ben and Jerry or not.

David: Absolutely, and I love it.

Joe: Do you think in the transactional process and more specifically, in the sales and marketing process, do they lend themselves to attaching themselves to this type of improvement over, Lean and Six Sigma by themselves?

David: Absolutely. It is the easiest space to play with. First of all, as I said, sales and marketing are very much human interaction-based to a very large degree. It's hard to automate them, and it's a lot easier to think of them as conversations. That's an immediate alignment with Strength-Based thinking. Also, salespeople and marketing people tend to, I don't want to generalize, but they tend to like talking about their successes and the best features of their products and the highlights rather than their failures, defects, wastes.

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In a way, the language that I'm using when I use Strength-Based approach to Lean Six Sigma is very natural to the language that is used in sales and marketing, and that already makes it a lot more accessible.

Joe: What has been some of your positive outcomes of using this approach?

David: The best outcomes were amazing ideas that came up and a complete way of thinking about the problems. Some people think that AI Is ignoring problems, so it is important for me to say AI is not ignoring problems. It's actually solving this problem in another way. The same goes for Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma. The successes I've had is, I've had a wonderful Kaizen event that went incredibly well and generated ideas that were never thought about in the organizations beforehand. I've had a piece of work with an Internet service provider that created a huge, completely different way of thinking about customer complaints. They were looking at how to minimize the customer complaints they had.

Typically, what you notice immediately is the creativity. Creativity and later on what you see also is the energy for implementation. You get people really excited to implement what they thought about, which was something that I always had to push and motivate afterward when I used to do the classic Lean Six Sigma.

Joe: I'm going to put you on the spot here. I'm a company. I'm a Lean Six Sigma company. I say, "OK, I want some help from you on how to shorten my sale cycle." How would you approach that person?

David: In my Strength-Based approach, first of all, I would find more about the situation. Because typically what you would find is, they would look at an average score. Within that average, you would find people who actually have a very short sales cycle and a very long sale cycle. I would immediately look at who has a very short sales cycle. What enables that? Who's involved? What are they doing that is correct and efficient and helps them close the sales more efficiently. That would give me a completely different view of shortening a sale cycle, then if I went after those who have the longer sale cycle and look at what's causing the waste or slowing them down.

Joe: Is this the main thrust of Almond Insight, the Strength-Based approach is this what you do there?

David: It is very much so, and I'd like to see myself as having started a movement in terms of StrengthBased Lean Six Sigma because it is a movement now, there are other people that are active and involved, and my business is very much dedicated to that. It's to drive a different way of thinking about our processes; getting to the same results, quality, flow, value to customers. We're still committed to that. How do you do it in a way that is not scary, stressful, threatening in any way? I know it wasn't the original intent of Lean thinking. Right now, you hear a lot of talk about removing waste, and that's associated with losing jobs. It's not really healthy. It's not healthy for people or their organizations.

Joe: I paint this scenario, and this is my own personal thoughts here. Making things better, faster, cheaper, is a tough process to build on anymore. That's why you see a movement towards innovation.

Innovation is driving successful companies. Better, faster, cheaper, that process mythology of the '90s Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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and the early 2000s, you can only do that for a short time period because someone catches up right away.

David: We're seeing it now in China, as well. Even someone else is catching up with China now.

Whereas China, used to do things cheaper, better, faster, they can't compete now with their competitors. We are shifting to a very different way of operating, and it is about this paradigm shift of moving from the technical look of the world to a more human-based and innovative way.

Joe: That's where that Strength-Based plays into it a lot, but there's one other thing that I want to mention that was on another podcast of mine, that I think fits into this is, they say that you can't be good at everything. In traditional Lean Six Sigma world, you're always trying to be excellent at everything, and that's really tough to do from a budget, from a man-power, from a customer viewpoint, everything. The Strength-Based seems to play into this that you really concentrate on what is the most important thing to your customer and what you do from a positive standpoint rather than just looking at the negative.

David: In the Lean Six Sigma world, we say between five and 30 percent of the process is generating value; the rest is waste. We focus so much on the waste, and we forget that we actually are generating value. If I actually, focus on the five percent, on the real positive core of my operation and my process, I can find ways of expanding those five percent to possibly 10 percent, to 20 percent and who knows how far I can get, but it will get me a lot further than trying to squeeze those 70 percent.

Joe: You have a LinkedIn group on Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma?

David: Yes, that's something that I started about three years ago. It's a group on LinkedIn called Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma. It was a way to connect to people and start spreading the idea and start this movement that I call the Strength-Based approach to Lean Six Sigma. The group is very active there are about 400 members now, and it's growing regularly, and it's really satisfying to see it. I have some very active members from around the world. Anywhere from Australia to Europe to the US, to South America, I have lots of members there, and the conversations are fantastic.

For me, it is a tool to A, create a profile for the topic and this unique approach, and also to connect with people and share stories. I post all my knowledge there and questions if we have and we help each other. It's a very nice group and very active, as well.

Joe: Is there something that you would like to add to this conversation that maybe I didn't ask?

David: I can tell you about the public speaking that I do on this topic so if that's of interest. I speak about this topic in conferences or within organizations depending on the interest. I'm going to deliver a couple of workshops in Toronto in June. If people are interested then, they can get in touch with me, and I can give them the details. I'm also actually working on a book on this topic which I hope to launch later on this year, and it's pretty much laying the possibilities and the connections between classic Lean Six Sigma and all the Strength-Based approaches.

Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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By the way, there are also other approaches that I use. It's not just AI. I also use something called solution focus, positive deviants, and a couple of tools from the strength movement and positive psychology. There's a lot that goes into Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma, but they're all enabling the exact same results we want to see in the classic world of Lean Six Sigma.

Joe: What's the best way for someone to contact you?

David: They can get me online through LinkedIn David Shaked, or they can email me to david@almond-Insight.com, and they can call me of course. There're lots of ways to get in touch. They can also join the LinkedIn group that I mentioned, which is named Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma.

Joe: What's your website again?

David: My website is www.almond-Insight.com Joe: I'd like to thank you very much, David. I appreciate the time, and you had some wonderful ideas on Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma. Thank you again.

David: Thank you very much, Joe, and thank you for the opportunity to do this podcast.

Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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Working Positive in a less than Perfect World Guest was Dr. Joey Faucette Dr. Joey Faucette (@drjoey) is the internationally known author of the #1 Amazon best-seller, Work Positive in a Negative World: Redefine Your Reality and Achieve Your Business Dreams.

Joe Dager: Welcome everyone! This is Joe Dager, the host of the Business901 podcast. With me today is Dr. Joey Faucette. Dr. Faucette is an author of the Amazon best-seller, Work Positive in a Negative World, professional speaker, and coaches business professionals to increase sales with greater productivity. His career was launched as a 9-year old door to door Christmas card salesman enabling him to purchase a new bike. Dr. Joey, I would like to welcome you and can you still describe that bike to me?

Dr. Joey Faucette: I can show you pictures of it, Joe. I’m delighted to be on Business901. Thanks so much for having me on. Back in that day, Joe and you may remember these days; three-speed bikes were all the novelty. Now you probably have 333-speed bikes. Three-speed bikes were a novelty. That was a big deal. I was the coolest kid on my block.

Joe: You kind of stayed in the sales area. Has your work always taken you in that direction or did you just grow out of all this being a salesperson?

Dr. Joey: No, no, no. I think anybody in business today Joe better be in sales. If you’re not in sales, you’re not going to be in business long because – and of course, if you take it to a little broader understanding of sales – we’re constantly representing ourselves. We’re constantly sharing our ideas and trying to get other people to buy into them. Whether you’re married and trying to get your wife to go to your favorite restaurant that evening, or whether you’re trying to get your child to be compliant with the behavior that you want, or whether you’re to keep your dog from wetting on the floor, you’re constantly trying to get somebody or something somewhere to buy into it. I really got into sales as a nine-year-old. I kind of backed into it. If you go to our website at listentolife.org and you click on “Who is Dr. Joey?”, by the way, you can see a picture of that bike there in the video. I had this grandiose idea about doing what every other nine-year-old kid does, and that is mowing grass and keeping lawns. I think about the third lawn I mowed in my budding enterprise; I got sick, and we discovered I had all these allergies. I wound up in Duke University Hospital, and they told my mom that I probably wouldn’t make it through the night and all this kind of stuff.

As Norman Vincent Peale said – Dr. Peale is one of my favorites – he said, “Within every adversity lies the seeds of opportunity.” I quickly figured out that my seed of opportunity was not in riding a lawn Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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mower but in doing something else. And Joe it’s kind of hard to turn down a kid when it’s 100 degrees outside, and he’s standing on your front porch, and he’s a cute little nine years old, and he asks you if you want to buy inscribed Christmas cards. I’m not as cute as I was as a nine-year-old anymore because I’m bald now, but still, there are lots of opportunities that lie in the midst of the adversity. That really was the genesis of the number one Amazon best-seller I wrote, Work Positive in a Negative World.

When the economy tanked a few years ago, it was all doom and gloom, people calling it the great recession. I just took that as an opportunity to find some opportunities that could help other people to maximize their income, as well as their potential.

Joe: Many listeners have heard quite a bit about appreciative inquiry and Strength-Based Lean. What’s different from maybe that work positive approach you take, or is it very similar to appreciative inquiry?

Dr. Joey: I think it’s very, very similar. What I discovered was, I went back into the Great Depression Joe and did some research and found that some great businesses had started during the Great Depression.

Here you had the worst economic disaster in the history of our country and maybe the world, and there’s Dale Carnegie writing, How to Win Friends & Influence People. That’s an international training company now. It did about $30 million last year. Harland Sanders before he was Colonel Sanders was up in Corbin, Kentucky and at 66 filed for bankruptcy. All he had left was a station wagon and some chicken legs and eleven secret herbs and spices, and there he goes off touring his part of the country, teaching people how to fry chicken. What I discovered was that while Napoleon Hill wrote, of course, Think and Grow Rich, following the Great Depression, Dr. Peale wrote, Power of Positive Thinking, in ‘52 which sort of built on that.

What I found was though that positive thinking is important; it takes more than just thinking about something; it takes more than just setting intentions. What I discovered I really think Joe were these five core practices that encompass your entire lifestyle and all of who you are as a person. It’s the mental dynamic which I call the perceived core practices. It’s the social dynamic which I refer to as the conceived core practice. There’s the emotional core practice, which is the believe core practice. There is the physical which is the achieved core practice. And then there’s the ethical which is the received core practice. You see how that covers all of your psychosocial dynamics as well as your physical dynamic, and it’s really a holistic approach if you will achieve a positive lifestyle at work.

Joe: How do we do that at work, though? In my world especially, in the quality world – we’re out there to solve problems. Can we put a positive spin on everything?

Dr. Joey: Well, it’s not actually putting a positive spin. The positive is already there in the midst of that.

It’s just a matter of discovering that. I understand exactly what you’re talking about. For instance, attorneys by trade, quality control engineers by trade, or even our medical profession are built upon people looking for things wrong. We’re diagnosing based on the flaws, based on the errors, and we become rather myopic around that Joe. You find depression rates higher among certain professions than others. And I’m not talking Great Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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Depression; I’m talking about medical depression. What you do in the perceived core practice for instance, and that’s the mental dynamic in the first core practice of a work positive lifestyle, you want to focus on the positive and filter out the negative. It’s not this namby-pamby rose-colored glasses kind of thing that negativity doesn’t exist in the world that there aren’t flaws and defects and things like that.

But instead of just discovering a defect, one looks at the totality of what went right in addition to what is wrong.

I refer to that as focusing on the positive and filtering out the negative so that we then play to our strengths, and we take those things that are positive. For instance, I work with a ton of business owners, and most of them are in a sales related profession – insurance and financial services, things like that. If I see on my P&L, my bottom line is not what I wanted it to be this month or for 2013, the past year, and then that can be depressing, or that can get me down, and so then I don’t want to pick up the telephone and make that next call, or I don’t want to see the next client. Instead of finding those what Chip & Dan Heath call bright spots and finding those things that went right. Where did we make money last year if I’m looking at my P&L? How can we accelerate that, leverage that, grow relationships around that, so that we make even more money in the coming year? We focus on the positive and filter out the negative. Does that make sense?

Joe: Sure. But it’s more than just bringing more money home to satisfy the budget, right?

Dr. Joey: Absolutely. It better be. That’s certainly one measure of success, right, Joe? But then there are all these others as well-meaning, purpose, fulfillment, satisfaction. All of that’s wrapped into the work positive lifestyle. Again you see that it covers the mental, social, emotional, physical, and ethical dynamics of who you are. So it’s across the spectrum, across the totality of who you are as a person at work in business today.

Joe: You talked about five core practices, and the first one perceived. The first step I need is to start framing the things I see differently?

Dr. Joey: Yes, exactly, I use the word redefine in the subtitle to our book. Redefine your reality and achieve your business dreams.” We tend to adopt the filters, the lenses for viewing the images in our world mentally from those people whom we spent a lot of time, and from the way we’re raised and all those psychosocial dynamics that enter in there. So you’re exactly right. We’re focusing on the positive.

So when you say reframing, I think that’s a good way of thinking about it. I prefer redefining because typically what we do is we inherit definitions whether it’s from our family of origin or from the people we’re working with or whomever. Their influence tells us what we should see, and as I talk about it in the book, you see what you’re looking for.

A perfect example would be let’s say I was there in Fort Wayne with you, and we went and picked up my friend Charly Butcher from Wowo, and we were going to go buy, let’s say we were going to buy you a new car. Let’s say it’s going to be a blue Honda Accord. By the way, Honda pays me nothing for Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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mentioning them. I wish they did. So Charly and you and we go out to a lot, and you find one you like, and then you discover that one of my ways of dealing with salespeople is I’m always ready to walk away if I don’t get the deal I want. So we walk away, and Charly is saying, “Joey, I can’t believe you buy Joe that car.” I said, “Just get in the car; we’ll find it in a minute.” As we pull out of the lot though, guess what passes us driving on to the lot – a blue Honda Accord. I’m taking you back to your subdivision; I’m driving in. Guess who’s coming out of your subdivision – a blue Honda Accord. We suddenly begin to see what we’re looking for. And were there any more blue Honda Accords on the road than there were previously? No, of course not. We just are seeing what we’re looking for because now we’re fixated on a blue Honda Accord. The same way with positive and negative. We focus on the positive, so we begin to look for it as opposed to allowing negative thought patterns to overwhelm the way we think about the way we do work. We use those positive thought patterns; then we see the positive more often.

Joe: I’m going to go through your five core. The second one is conceived. What’s the difference between conceiving and perceive? What is the difference there? They sound kind of the same.

Dr. Joey: They are a lot the same. Let’s say that you perceive the positive; you’re focusing on the positive and filtering out the negative. Now mentally, Joe, you’re thinking more positive thoughts. We give you a whole lot of tips and strategies to do that, by the way, in the book and in our 7 Weeks to Working Positive coaching program. You’re vibrating if you will, your more positive Joe. Conceive is a social dynamic. We use the word conceive of describing the social dynamic of a work positive lifestyle, because it takes two to conceive, at least as I understand biology. It’s that social dynamic because if I’m all positive now or I’m working on being positive, suddenly I realize that the people around me, specifically for our case here, the people at work, maybe they’re not having the same kind of focusing on the positive filtering out the negative experience. Right?

I’m discovering some negative people at work. “How do I deal with these negative people without becoming one myself?” becomes a real serious case for me because as Jim Rohm told us for so many years, “We become the average of the five persons with whom we associate the most.” I really help a lot of people, and in fact, this is one of the keynotes that I enjoy doing, discover how to remain positive, how to be positive without becoming negative like these people. And I have a pet name for negative people Joe. That’s Eeyore vampires. I call them Eeyore vampires. You remember Eeyore from Winniethe-Pooh. His constant refrain was, “It’ll never work.”

These people from work are like that. You can try that new method if you want to or you can do something different if you want to, which is usually what they’re bristling against because it’s unfamiliar, and it’s changed. But it’s going to fail. It’s okay I guess – it’d be one thing to deal with these Eeyores if they stayed at work but when you leave work, and you go home, and the sun goes down, Eeyores morph into vampires who begin suck time, energy and attention away from you. You’re at home with your family, the people that you love, and you choose to be with, and whom are you thinking about?

That Eeyore at work, whether it’s the boss, or it’s a coworker or an employee, a customer, a client. And so they’re Eeyore vampires. How do you deal with those Eeyore vampires without becoming one Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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yourself is a key component of how you conceive the positive at work, Joe. Joe: You have to go ahead and be able to gather support. You have to build that social community of being positive and conceive it that way. What’s the third practice?

Dr. Joey: The third core practice of a work positive lifestyle, Joe is, “I believe it.” This is the emotional dynamic. It really has two components to it. One is being engaged with your work. We mention meaning, purpose,fulfillment, satisfaction, things like that earlier. That’s where this comes into play.

Feeling like my work makes a difference. Seeing my work as valuable. I get fulfillment out of my work. As I like to say, “Do what you love and love what you do.” There’s that emotional engagement with your work. But there’s also Joe, the negative world can emotionally crush us if we let it and if we’re just in this deluge, these tsunamis of negativity which seem to be coming at us from all over the place.

What it does is it literally suppresses our imagination, specifically what Napoleon Hill talks about in Think and Grow Rich as our creative imagination. He talks about two different types – the synthetic and the creative imagination. The creative imagination is what we’re looking at here. And this is where you connect dots that maybe other people aren’t connecting. So you come up with solutions, you broaden outcomes that perhaps you wouldn’t otherwise. That creative imagination is engaged right there that propels your business forward, really quantum leaps. This is how most innovation occurs; Joe is right out of that creative imagination, or right out of the believe core practice.

Joe: I can guess this one. At some point in time, you gotta do it, right?

Dr. Joey: That’s it, man; you got to do it. This is the achieve core practice. The fourth one is the one people want to jump right to. “Hey, Dr. Joe, give me the silver bullet. I want to go right there to it.”

Joe: Nike does it.

Dr. Joey: Yes, but it’s never that easy. What I discovered in my research was that this is a manifestation.

This is what everybody sees. I live in the South on the East Coast, and it’s like Kudzu. Kudzu first grows underground, and you don’t see it, and then it starts popping up all over the hillside, and you’re like, “Where did that come from?” Well, it’s been growing underground for all this time. Most people just see the results, and that’s all they want to go right to. They don’t realize that, for instance, the country music band Alabama played for twelve years at the Bowery down in Myrtle Beach South Carolina before anybody ever heard their records. Thomas Edison had thousands of failed attempts at a light bulb before he lit up the room.

We want to go right to results, and we want it overnight, and it just doesn’t happen that way. What you do first is perceive it mentally, conceive it socially, and then believe it emotionally, and then you add action. And once you add an action to what you’re perceiving, conceiving, and believing – that is you do something – then the whole thing takes on the ability to create results. It’s not just simply navel-gazing if Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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you will mentally, socially, emotionally, but there’s activity. You pick up the phone, and you make that call. You and I, for instance, I think we met on Twitter. That means we both acted in such a way that we made ourselves available to people via social media. That’s how you and I connected. You gotta do something, and then the results speak for themselves. The really cool thing about the work positive lifestyle Joe is that there are exponential results. You see results beyond your imagination because you’ve perceived it, conceived it, believed it, and then you act in such a way that you achieve it.

Joe: Let me take a guess at the fifth one, and I actually do not know it. I’m going to take a guess it’s something about sustainability.

Dr. Joey: Yes, exactly, it is sustainability because you want to keep the wheel turning, right, Joe? You want to keep this work positive lifestyle that you’re developing moving forward. I thought like you were just saying a minute ago; we want some results. I thought that the fourth core practice of achieving was it. I mean, what else is there? Your P&L’s looking great, you’re producing more widgets or providing more services than you’ve ever done before. I thought that’s the end of it.

What I discovered was that when you receive the core practice that that’s the ethical almost mandate, I want to say that the universe rewards you when you invest in others. Zig Ziglar used to say it this way, “When you help other people get what they want, you get everything you want.” If you’re a local business person, you begin to invest in your community, and you find ways of helping through nonprofit organizations or through sponsoring a little league team or something like that. You invest yourself. Just a simple act of saying thank you to your customers and clients is a huge, huge door opener because they’re not expecting it. You and I could do another show on customer service and the death of customer service today. And yet how easy it is for a business to make a huge mark on its local community just by saying thank you and serving others. So yes, Joe, you reap what you sow. It’s sustainability; it keeps the wheel turning.

Joe: I see this; I believe it. The five steps, I assume they have to be somewhat in order. But to make a change, there usually has to be a driving platform. What gets people to commit to this positive style?

Dr. Joey: It goes right back to the quote I gave you earlier from Dr. Peale, “Within adversity lies the seeds of opportunity.” Whenever we, at least in my experience and studying people and why they change, and I’ve been studying change for probably 25, 30 years. It usually takes some sort of crisis, which of course the Chinese use two characters for the word crisis. One meaning danger and the other opportunity. I guess it boils down to what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. That’s the way I translate the Chinese right at that point. Most of us are going to continue to rock along.

In fact, Jeff Olson, in his great best-seller, The Slight Edge, talks about how 95% of us just kind of rock along in the midst of mediocrity. Whatever it is we’re doing, we’re doing. But it’s when some adversity rears its head, it’s when something happens to cause change, and it’s uninvited change. Then how we react to that change, how we react to that problem or whether we see it as a problem, a challenge, or an opportunity Joe, that then becomes the platform for embracing it as an opportunity and creating this Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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change. So we can expect about 5% of any group to naturally want to rise above. And I don’t know why maybe it’s just a natural part of their DNA. But I think it’s a concerted effort and a choice to selfimprove. I really do. So that 5% is going to do it. Now for the other 95% usually it takes some sort of crisis, some sort of problem, danger, to rear its ugly head and to promote the change. You either become a victor or a victim at that point.

Joe: I may phrase this wrong, but can I become positive on my own? Or does that social component really have to be there? Does someone have to help me get there?

Dr. Joey: In my experience, Joe, my results – and this is something as an entrepreneur I face constantly. I don’t mean this braggadocio – but entrepreneurs by and large are really good at a lot of different things, and so they begin to buy the lie that they can do it all. They may be able to do it all, but they can’t do it all at once. For me adopting a work positive lifestyle and the people I’ve worked with and seen do it best are those who leverage their efforts through relationships. Shawn Achor in his great book, The Happiness Advantage, talks about this very thing, about how in times of problem or crisis we invest in our social networks, that the people who do that are the ones who move through the problem, and the challenge, and the danger the best. Because what happens is if I’m in all these social dynamics, then I get that positivity reflected back to me. Often times it’s amped up Joe. Most of the time, it’s coming back to me in ways that are greater than what I gave it. Again five people together can accomplish more than one person can alone. So yes, I think it does in terms of accountability, partnership, and just an exponential increase of the positivity.

Joe: Can I create a work positive organization? Does it have to be an individual thing? Can it be an organization? I work for the greatest organization in the world. Is Disney a work positive relationship or Pixar?

Dr. Joey: Yes. Google or SAS, we could go on and name a bunch of them. I think so, and I think those organizations are the ones that are leading edge innovators that are providing better customer service, better product, better services at large when they’re following these five core practices. And in fact, my particular enjoyment in life is working with small business owners. Small business owners constitute about 85% of the businesses in this country and employ a little better than 40% of all the people that work in this country today. What I enjoy doing is helping business owners achieve what I like to call Joe, the work positive DNA in their company. Their sales increase, their teams, are more effective, and that business owner gets to get out of the office earlier as does everyone else on the team. They can get out there and do what they love with the people that they love because that’s why we’re all really working.

We want money, but really what we want is independence, to be able to spend time with our children or grandchildren, to be able to take a long walk on the beach or hike a mountain. These are the things that we really want to do. So we’re seeking to by ourselves this kind of time is what we’re really after Joe. Joe: I have to ask you since you work with the salespeople, can they use these same principles attacking Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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– not attacking. That’s not a very work positive type thing, is it?

Dr. Joey: For trying to deal with Eeyore vampires, yes, we want to slay them.

Joe: But from a sales approach, when I’m meeting with a customer, can I take this positive approach in solving sales problems and looking for opportunities? Is that the way I should be presenting myself to customers?

Dr. Joey: Totally. And that’s the way successful people do it anyway. My friend Jeb Blount who has salesgravy.com, the largest job word site on the internet for sales professionals, wrote a book called, People Buy You, and wrote another book called, People Love You. It’s all about those interpersonal relationships regardless of how we’re communicating whether it’s in person, or by phone, or by Skype or whatever it is that we’re using. So yes. In fact, I work with salespeople in lots of different industries in how to become work positive themselves so that they begin to attract their ideal clients and work them through various exercises so that they know who their ideal clients are so that they focus on those ideal clients and attracting those ideal clients so that they increase their sales with greater productivity in the sales process.

Joe: This is a great opportunity for a salesman. One of my indicators, whether someone’s going to be good in sales or not, is how they frame the word “no.” If it’s just a temporary or an ending thing.

Dr. Joey: That’s right. How final is no?

Joe: And if it’s only a temporary thing they’re probably going to be a good salesman.

Dr. Joey: That’s exactly right. Well, it’s a good sign when you’re getting no and when you’re getting resistance if you’re a good sales professional because it just means, “Tell me more.” And some people their first answer is going to be no regardless, so you just got to get beyond that. If you don’t have a strong ego, or if you lack a strong ego, and have a problem with rejection, you probably need to build widgets instead of sell widgets.

Joe: I have to ask you about the on-hold messages that you have on your website, what are they about? I was intrigued by them.

Dr. Joey: That’s interesting you should ask that. What we do is I have a couple of different blogs that you find at our website at listentolife.org. One of them is the Work Positive blog, and the other is the Live Positive blog because what I found is in teaching about the perceive core practice, we talk about your daily routines, specifically your morning and your evening routines. I encourage people to take ten minutes in the mornings, five minutes that they spend reading positive literature or listening to positive music and then five minutes of visualizing positive outcomes to their appointments that day or to the day that they anticipate.

Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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People said, “Dr. Joey, what kind of positive literature do you recommend?” I started a blog back in I guess it was ‘99, it was actually a syndicated radio show and newspaper column for a time back when those media were really booming, and it’s called Live Positive. It’s a short motivational some of them even inspirational positive story about everyday life. It’s become a pretty cool thing. It’s become almost a community thing with people emailing me their stories and things like this. I get to be kind of a positive community storyteller around the world. What we do is we take the recording of those – they’re podcasts also – into the studio, and my engineers slice them and dice them, and I do custom opens and closes for various businesses around the country. We put together maybe a little ten or fifteen-second product promotion thing at the end of these stories. But basically when somebody gets put on hold, they get to listen to me sharing a positive story about an everyday life experience that I had with one of my daughters, or with one of the dogs or the horses here on the farm. Just regular everyday life. It’s far different from the elevator music that you hear a lot of times from the incessant drone of commercials that you get when you’re on hold.

Joe: I think that’s very intriguing. What’s the best way for someone to contact you and learn more about what you do?

Dr. Joey: Thanks so much for asking Joe. If you go to our website at listentolife.org, there you’ll find an opportunity to watch a free webinar video that we’ve produced about the work positive lifestyle and specifically gives you information about our 7 Weeks to Work Positive coaching program. You can also go to Amazon and order our number one Amazon best-seller, Kindle, Audible – I did the narration myself – or paperback. Entrepreneur Magazine and I produced this book, and that was a great, great experience working with that dream team there at Entrepreneur Magazine. And you can get it again; it’s Work Positive in a Negative World.

Joe: Well, I would like to thank you very much, Dr. Joey. This podcast will be available on the Business901 blog site and Business901 iTunes store. So thanks again.

Dr. Joey: My pleasure, Joe. Thanks for having me on.

Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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Building Positive and Engaging Business Improvement Guest was David Shaked David Shaked of Almond-Insight discusses his book, Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma: Building Positive and Engaging Business Improvement.

Joe Dager: Welcome everyone! This is Joe Dager, the host of the business901 podcast. With me, today is David Shaked of Almond-Insight. He is a positive change leader for individuals, teams, and organizations.

He is a practitioner and teacher of several strength-based approaches to change (such as Appreciative Inquiry, Solution Focus coaching, and Positive Deviance), as well as Lean and Six Sigma. In his new book 'Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma, he presents an innovative and unique approach that combines the leading approaches to business improvement with the latest developments from the world of organizational change. This blended approach helps build a much more positive, engaging, and ultimately more sustainable culture of continuous improvement.

David, I’d like to welcome you and have been a big fan of yours since being introduced and our first podcast where I invited you back when you completed your book. Does it seem like yesterday or years ago?

David Shaked: Good morning to all, and thank you for having me again. Yes, it’s been a while since the last one, but I still remember it very vividly. So thank you for calling me back and for giving me the opportunity to talk about the book.

Joe: We should start out by defining what Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma is and give us a little introduction, per se.

David: Many people want to know what Lean and Six Sigma are. Some people know about strengthbased change involving methodologies like Appreciative Inquiry, Positive Deviance, and Solution Focus or Positive Psychology. Very few people know that you can actually effectively combine the two worlds.

You can do process improvement using Lean and Six Sigma but infuse it with strength-based change and basically what it means is doing the exact same things you do in Lean and Six Sigma, but taking a different lens to it. The lens is the lens of what works, what is actually producing value, what is efficient,

Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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what is flowing, and where good results are happening. The idea is to learn from that rather than to search for the problems that defect the waste and everything else that isn’t well. The more we learn about what works, the more we know what works and, therefore, the more we know what we need to do more. If we start by the common path learning what the problems are, the defects, the waste, the bottlenecks, if we start to learn that way, we will only know what doesn’t work. That doesn’t actually give us any idea about what could work instead and so what ends up is we think about ideas from elsewhere, not from our own situation. The Strength-Based Approach is actually a search for what works using the exact same approach as Lean and Six Sigma process being 5s, Kaizen Event and everything else that you would do, specifically looking for what works in the situation and finding ways to expand that.

Joe: You just brought up something, and everyone loves tools, and you do a great job describing a few like the Root Cause of Success, the Seven Signs of Values, Strength-Based A3s - putting a different look at all these Lean and Six Sigma tools and doing it from a positive approach.

David: Yes, absolutely. You can do all the tools, but what’s important for me to start with is not at the tools level. It’s more about the concept of what are we looking at and applying it at the whole system level, so the tools can be used in the same way you would use any tools in Lean and Six Sigma. Looking from the positive strength-based lens to it, a wishbone or a root cause of success is used instead of a root cause of defects. At a higher level, you can use the approach to figure out, to create a shared vision or what Lean and Six Sigma for what quality and efficiency programs you want to have in the organization and use Appreciative Inquiry to get to that vision in a lot more engaging way. A way that will actually get people excited about the efficiency program. The Strength-Based Approach can be made at a tools level, but it can also be done at the team level, the project level, or even at the whole organization level.

Joe: What is really different about Strength-Based? Is it just a different spin on Lean and Six Sigma, I mean, what’s at the core of it? What really makes it different?

David: Based on my experience over the past five years I’ve been using this particular approach after 15 years of using the Classic approach, I can see what the difference is, and the difference is really people get a lot more energetic, engaged and very-very creative when they take the problem-solving process from the Strength-Based Approach. The reason is if you talk about problems, if you analyze the problems over and over again, you actually degrade the energy that people have; people get overwhelmed by wastes and defects. If you actually start inquiring into what they do well, when they have performed at their best, what is the best performance of the process they are responsible for – you get a completely different response from them and a lot more interest and engagement. Actually, any change we drive does require energy, does acquire engagement and the energy you get actually opens up creativity that you simply do not get from the classic approach.

Joe: How important is it to start out constructing the Strength-Based approach versus waffling between traditional approaches and strength-based?

Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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David: It’s a good question actually and what I would say is the more strength-based you are, the more, I think, faster the insights and the ideas come, and the more creative they are. So ultimately, it is up to each and every practitioner to blend the approaches they use in the best way that works for them. I personally only use the Strength-Based Approach because I’ve seen that it works much better, and I’m basing it on my many years of experience of making the Deficit Approach. Ultimately for every practitioner they would choose the blend that they want of the different ways of doing it but the Strength-Based Approach is basically coming from a completely different paradigm, and we don’t believe in one way of solving problems, but rather in creating many possibilities and by using the Strength-Based Approach you actually open up possibilities.

Joe: So it would be fair to say that we could use a SWOT analysis and also a SOAR analysis back to back.

David: You could. And you know what happens – when you actually talk about SWOT analysis we all are supposed to talk about strength and opportunities, but eventually the vast majority of the conversation that happens is around the weaknesses, and what that does is actually shifts energy completely because the more we talk about these flaws and weaknesses, the less we know what we could. But if we do SOAR upfront, we are not ignoring these threats and weaknesses; we are still considering them, but we are coming from a completely different direction; we are coming from the direction of what strength we have that we could use, what opportunities we have which are the reframed expression of the weaknesses and threats and also what resorts and aspirations we have, what resort do we want to achieve and what hopes and ask a question that we have and that conversation is a completely different conversation from the one we have in SWOT. Joe: One of the things that you mentioned in the book is about starting the engagement and that your first question within the engagement is so important. Could you expand on how that frames the rest of the conversation?

David: For those who are unfamiliar with Appreciative inquiry what AI talks about is the very first question we ask influences the direction we take and therefore, the results we will get. That’s why I emphasized the very first question we asking as practitioners, as improvement practitioners. What I ask specifically is, normally a client or someone I work with will start telling me about the problem, about the situation that we are facing, which is less than optimal. What I ask them the first question would actually determine where we go with the conversation, so it’s very important to be conscious of that.

Rather than ask them to tell me more about the problem and when does it occur and who’s responsible and what are the root causes, everything else that I used to ask before, instead I actually ask questions like ‘Tell me when is this situation not happening or not as severe as it is the way you are describing right now’ or ‘Tell me what would you like to have instead.’ Questions like that actually lead us in a completely different and much more open-minded direction, and eventually, they do address the problem, but they address it from a completely different direction. A direction that is, you get less of a sense of a threat or weakness, you are getting much more confidence because people can tell you when Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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the problem doesn’t happen. Normally they find that there are many situations when the problem doesn’t happen, and they start learning from their own experience, their own system, their own organization what helps them, the problem not to occur. That knowledge is much more relevant than any knowledge you can bring from the outside world.

Joe: I have to say in the book you did such an excellent job with, at the end of each chapter of giving questions that made you not only think about the material in the chapter, but it made me look at how I could construct an engagement using what you just told me. Was that the purpose of creating them, and what are some the other ways to use them?

David: Well, thank you, first of all, for the feedback, it’s nice to hear it, and my purpose with this question was actually to get people to think and create for themselves the Strength-Based Approach they want to take for Lean and Six Sigma. There is obviously the way that I practice it, and I practice it in many different ways, but eventually, if I take the Strength-Based Approach to the other practitioners that would read the book, what I would like to hope and believe is that they know a lot already. The purpose of the question that I’m asking in each chapter is to help people uncover what they already know rather than what they don’t know. So again, I’m applying the exact same approach to what people know and then introduce some of my examples to help them continue to build on what they already know, and that’s really the purpose of the questions.

Joe: I love the comparison tables in the book between the Strength-Based Approach and the traditional practice; it was extremely helpful.

David: Thank you. The comparison was taken from the contribution that was made by Jackie Kelm who’s a very well-known author in the world of Appreciative Inquiry, and I built on it as well, and it’s also important for me to say that we sometimes present it, you know, one against the other, ultimately we often blend them to some extent and there is, it’s not that the Deficit Approach or the Classic Approach to Lean Six Sigma is not useful, it is, but it’s more about shifting as much as possible to the StrengthBased Approach which I personally believe, and experience is better.

Joe: If I have a tendency to be Appreciative Inquiry guy with a little Lean Six Sigma background or if I’m a traditional Lean Six Sigma guy trying to move the Appreciative Inquiry, which is easier to do?

David: My own personal transition was from the Classic Lean Six Sigma to Appreciative Inquire and later on to the combination of them wasn’t very easy I must admit, and that’s what drove me to write a book.

I would say that there are some easier ways, for example, for those who practice Lean Six Sigma specifically, one easy way or relatively easier way to transition to this world would be to learn about solution-focused coaching which is one of the approaches I use, it’s not necessarily AI, but it’s very close in line with it or even positive deviance. These two approaches are slightly easier for the Lean Six Sigma practitioners amongst us. Just to grasp our practicing and start working with AI would come next for many people, for those coming from the world of AI or any of the other Strength-Based approaches I Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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wouldn’t necessarily focus on Lean and Six Sigma because it tends to be very technical and full of terms and tools that they wouldn’t necessarily know, but by reading the book that the Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma book they can actually start understanding the language better and find the ways to integrate what they already know with the people they work with who may know more about Lean and Six Sigma.

Joe: Lean and Six Sigma are full of metrics; can we throw them out of the window when we move to Strength-Based, or are we still measuring stuff?

David: You still measure stuff and, actually, I believe that metrics being, so key to any organization is a very good contribution that Lean and Six Sigma make to the world of Appreciative Inquiry. In AI traditionally, you don’t see a lot of talk about measurement, but Lean Six Sigma can introduce you… provided again, you use the Strength-Based lens or approach to it. When you talk about metrics, when you review your metrics, we tend to look at what’s red, what is underperforming, what is less than the average, etc. Actually, you can learn just as much if not more if you learn and put as much energy to the green indicators which we know we tend to ignore altogether. How do we learn what’s working well and making sure that we continue to do it and even building it and with the red indicators it’s less about learning what doesn’t work and why, it more about so how do we want it to be different, and it’s all about creating a completely different conversation with those different questions.

Joe: Often, these engagements in Lean and Six Sigma are driven by Kaizen Events, and in the book, you specify a way to create a Kaizen Event from the Strength-Based Approach. Could you just kind of open that up and talk about that a little bit, what’s different between a typical Kaizen Event and a StrengthBased Kaizen Event because I thought that was a great part in the book.

David: Thank you. Strength-Based Kaizen Event does follow very much the structure you would follow in a Classic Kaizen Event. What I introduced in it is, first of all, I introduced an Appreciative Inquiry interview about the process we want to improve, so upfront people interviewed each other using Appreciative Inquiry questions on the best cases they had when they performed that process or when they’ve seen the outcomes of the process. The purpose of that is to start as I said the very first questions we ask are most important, so to start the conversation right away from a Strength Approach finding out what works really well with this process. We are told to do the Kaizen Events to focus on understanding the process as it is rather than as it should be, nobody is turning us to do it as it is when it is not working.

We can actually learn from the process as it is when it is working, and that’s the biggest difference. Then you can take any of the tools that you would use and use them again from a Strength-Based Approach.

Many times I do a value stream map, and I would do it again from a Strength-Based point of view.

Mapping the process as it is, as it is when it’s working, and understanding what’s working, what is producing value. I use tools like the Seven Signs of Value because is I want people to generate value, to increase value; I need to teach them what gives value rather than what takes away the value.

Joe: It’s really hard. I mean I’ve been drilled so much in problem-solving and asking why and digging down to find root causes of problems and that mind shift isn’t something you just step away from. You Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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keep finding yourself falling back into it when you’ve been trained that way. What are some tips to keep me on the right path?

David: Actually, Joe, you explained the challenge of many people, including myself. I’ve trained myself over time to specifically notice what is the story I’m hearing from a client or a person I’m working with and specifically look for what is still working, what is still possible, however, difficult the situation is. That is the very first thing I do, I actually think for myself in the story that I hear, in the program description, in the waste situation or whatever the situation is, what is still working, and that’s the very first thing I do for myself, I reflect as I listen what am I hearing that is working here rather than isn’t working. How do I find out more about it, and if I’m not hearing any of that working well, then I start asking myself, what am I not hearing at all? For example, if someone is telling me that the problem is happening, frequently then one thing I haven’t heard is when that problem does not happen and why and what happens then. That is a matter of what requires really training yourself as a practitioner as an improvement practitioner, ultimately; we need to remember that we all want the same result – we all want a better future than the current state, it’s just how we get and what questions we ask along the way. You are right; it takes us a long time training because we have been trained in our practice to ask a lot of deficit questions, and we believe that it’s the objective way of looking at something; it’s not an objective way necessarily, it’s just one way of looking at the situation and what is important to say is that there is another way which I believe is better.

Joe: Why is this needed now? Do you believe? I mean, what makes it practical and useful now?

David: As I said, I’ve practiced for many years Lean and Six Sigma in a classic way and they work, I don’t want to say that they don’t work, but in the long term they become very hard to maintain and very difficult challenging to expand beyond a particular project, division of a business or one department and that’s the biggest thing I think you can get from Strength-Based Approach because you can engage larger systems with it and by doing that the positive way you are actually getting everyone excited about being Six Sigma rather than dreading the approach that they’ve heard about before, so it is a good time to do that, there is also a massive expansion in the practice of Lean and Six Sigma around the world specifically Lean, I can see a lot of more and more growing practice and even in the public sector which is really trying to do as much of it as possible. It would be fantastic if they actually started to do it from the Strength-Based Approach because I believe they’ll get a too much-much better result and will not, will keep people engaged and involved and wanting to contribute and that’s really what matters here.

Joe: Where can I learn more, where can I get the book, and how can someone contact you?

David: The book is available from any retailer like Amazon; you can find it in print or in the Kindle version if you like. It is coming out in the US at the end of November, 28th of November. It’s already available all across Europe and in some other countries around the world. You can contact me via my email, which is david@almond-insight.com, and I would be very happy to hear from the people who’ve read the book or interested in the topic and answer any question. There is also a LinkedIn group under Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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the topic of Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma, and people are very welcome to join and get involved in the conversation. It is a growing community around the world, we have a few hundred people who are now very passionate practitioners and interested in the practice, and I hope to see many more.

Joe: I think it is one of the better groups on LinkedIn and of course, holding to its origins, it is a very positive group. It’s not one that everyone is trying to one-up somebody else all the time. There is a very positive approach taken on that thread, so I compliment you for managing that well, David.

David: Thank you very much, but it is also the contribution that everyone – including yourself, Joe, you put some very interesting conversations in there, and it’s nice to build on everyone’s strength, and that’s what helps them to learn that we have and, by the way, some of the things that I put in the book I actually learned from the conversations we had in the LinkedIn group.

Joe: Well, I want to thank you very much. This podcast will be available on the Business901 blog site, and Business901 iTunes store, so thanks again, David.

David: Thank you very much, Joe, and thank you for having me today.

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Positive Organizational Development Tools Guest was Sarah Lewis Joe Dager: Welcome everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of the Business901 Podcast. With me today is Sarah Lewis. She is the Managing Director of Appreciating Change; a psychological change consultancy focused on helping leaders and managers achieve positive change in their organizations. She has written two excellent books, Positive Psychology at work, and my favorite, Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management. I have to say that my last podcast with Sarah is still one of my favorites, and I jumped at the chance to have her on again. Sarah, how have you been and welcome back.

Sarah takes the gambit of appreciative inquiry from personal coaching all the way through organizational change, and what makes your organization able to do that?

Sarah: It’s not so much my organization, actually is the methodology itself. Appreciative inquiry is such a scalable methodology because it’s about systems, and a system can be around one person. So, if I’m coaching, I’m interested in the person in that context and the system that they’re thinking about and working with and engaged with. And then, obviously, a team is a system, and so is an organization. So, it’s the methodology that allows me to have that great range and of course I have a network of associates and colleagues who if I need additional people for a larger piece of work I call them right in.

Joe: One of the things that intrigue me on your website is the briefcase studies you have on it. They all structured very similar; they include an invitation, the current state, and then the outcome that was achieved. Is that an indicator on how you approach your work?

Sarah: I think how you get invited into an organization, how the invitation is framed is very interesting. I mean it tells you a lot about the organization in itself and part of being, for anybody I think, being a more sophisticated consultant is not just accepting the invitation necessarily say at face value because that old cliché about what they think they want and what they might actually need or might be most useful isn’t necessarily an immediate match.

There’s an art of recognizing the invitation, engaging with the invitation, hearing the desire for change in the invitation and helping the organization to shape that into something that is possibly a little bit more Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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open, a little bit more useful, allows for a more positive outcome that kind of thing. I’m always interested in and come in such alarming ways often. We can just start a situation, come in and do something, or I always love the kind of “We’d really like you to help us. We need to let you know we do eat consultants for breakfast.” One is not to be put off by all of that. It’s just an expression of their need and sometimes, their anxiety. And then, the evaluation, I think being able to, both for me and for the organization, being able to demonstrate progress from when we started to when we finish is very important. Sometimes, I can negotiate better evaluation processes than others. But, for myself, I always want to know what’s different for people and their processes and systems in their organization after we’ve done a piece of work to when we started.

Joe: Do you find it difficult getting that current state framed with the company because aren’t they in there for you to do some action, to create something to happen? Are they willing to accept that time period of kind of educating you about the current state?

Sarah: I see the two as happening kind of simultaneously. To take a typical example, if I’m working with a team, say it’s a team of 8 people then I very much want to have an individual conversation with each of the people beforehand, but that’s not just information gathering. So, a certain amount of it is getting a sense of where things are at the moment, what sense people are making of what’s happening, what accounts they are creating of possible and also how they got to where they are, the kind of what’s wrong and who’s to blame stories. So, I want to know where people’s thinking is, how they make sense of the situation, but I’m also working in an appreciative way. So, I’m asking them appreciative questions in those initial conversations and hopefully starting to gently challenge some of those stories and some of that sense-making and suggest that there are alternative ways of looking at things and I’m also probably co-creating with them ideas about what we could do when we’re together. So, I’ll talk about things I’ve done with other groups and how that’s gone and what it sounds like that might be useful, and I’m aiming to get them by the end of the conversation saying “That sounds interesting. I’d like to be part of that.” That’s how I get the sense of where we are at the moment, while also effectively starting the intervention because as you all know with appreciative inquiry as I sometimes say “there is no before”, you know, that moment you start engaging with the organization, you’re either reinforcing the way it already is by just accepting what it tells you or you’re starting to change things by asking questions that haven’t thought about before.

Joe: I have to back up. The other day in the mail, I received your new Appreciating Cards. Thank you very much, and what’s the proper name for them?

Sarah: Positive Organizational Development Cards.

Joe: What you just talked about there, is that how the cards are framed; the conversation that you might have just as you’ve just discussed a little bit?

Sarah: I tend to use them more with groups at the moment. So, as you know, in each of the cards the Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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front page, the front side just gives you a sense of the concept that we’re thinking about, the thing that helps make a positive organization. So, just picking up a couple here, I’ve Feeling Connected, so in positive organizations, people feel much more connected. Mindfulness, the very popular topic people, are very interested in and again in some of the more positive flourishing organizations is one of its characteristics that people are not just running on automatic pilot. They’re sort of thinking about what they’re doing and the impact on others. And so, on the front side, there’re some words like with Mindfulness, we got the words Presence, Attending, Noticing, Relating and Decision Making because mindfulness is very important to effective decision making so that we don’t just keep making the same decisions as if the world hasn’t changed. And then, on the reverse side, I’ve got a few questions to help people have a really good discussion. So, again, for the Mindfulness one, we’ve got ‘Describe a recent experience of really being in the moment. What was happening?’ So, we’re asking people to identify when they are mindful and of course we might, you know, they might discover that actually, they’re always living in the past or the future or, in a worrying stage about creating lists for something rather.

And then, there’s another question, ‘What are the most critical situations where you need to be very mindful?’ It’s quite generic, so we could apply them to an individual or a team or an organization. You know when do you really need to be paying attention because something different might be happening here? Because there may be changes going on that you haven’t noticed that could be important. And then, of course, there’s ‘How does your organization encourage people to be mindful when working with customers, suppliers or other stakeholders?’ which is part of that same question again about how do you help your people notice the little changes in the world, their social world that might be indicative of a need for the organization to adjust in some way. So, the questions are to help people explore the concept, to discover something about themselves and about their situation. You can also, of course, add in a question that’s a kind of weighting scale so thinking about your organization at the moment, on a scale of 1 to 10, how mindful would you say it is, how attentive is it to what’s going on, where would you like it to be, what makes that difference, what would it look like if it was a 9 rather than a 4, that kind of thing. And then, there’re a few kinds of suggestions of what organizations might want to do or individuals or teams to help increase the sort of quality and quantity of this facet, aspect or their organizational life.

Joe: Is this something that I can use internally, or is this something that’s better with a coach or someone in training?

Sarah: I would like to think that they could be used by people internally as well as a coach or a consultant. I’ve tried to make them so that even if you’re not overly familiar with the ideas of Appreciative Inquiry and Positive Psychology, they’re kind of self-explanatory enough that you can have a go at using them and have a good chance of stimulating an interesting and developmental conversation. Clearly, if you’re a little bit more familiar with some of the ideas that would really help and, of course, they all come from the book so you can always, you know, have a look at the book and read up on them. But, some of them, another one would be Positive Emotions, and there’s quite a lot of talk about these days about happiness and well-being and the difference that it makes and the relationship between feeling good and being successful and so on. So, if somebody wanted to explore Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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with their team or their colleagues, how can we help create a more positive environment in the workplace, both for the benefit of individuals themselves but also perhaps because it might help boost our productivity. And then, this would be a good place to start; you could do some questions for discussion and then some suggestions afterward.

Joe: Well, how else would you use the cards? HR use them, or would you think a more, a middle management type person could use them in training? How would you like to see them used?

Sarah: I think they can be used in different ways. I mean particularly strategic discussions around culture because they are kind of how do we want our organization to be? What do we want to grow in our organization? Looking at these different things, these different ways of being, these different aspects of organizational life, which are the ones that are important to us? So, any strategic conversation they’ll be very useful for. But, you can also use them for like the kind of icebreaker, what I mean actually was a colleague of mine was using it with the team that handled, worked with before, and he spread the cards out and just sort of said basically “Have a look at these and just pick one that as we say, you know, speaks to you at the moment.” And, they had a look at them and one woman, and then tell us why you picked your card, and one woman picked up the card, I think it was Feeling Connected, feeling part of a team, being in sync with others, aligned with other people, you know, feeling part of a bigger thing and it really stimulated a lot of insight and observation for her that she had recently moved into a new job where she was no longer feeling connected and how much she missed that and how her well-being at work and her morale and her productivity were all falling off because she was now working with data in a computer and not working with people which is what she’d done before, and she was very emotional apparently.

This was just in the first hour of the day, so that must have been fun. I use them with a group at the end of the day. Again, look at these cards and which of these, given our work today, is most meaningful to you, and would you like to do some takeaways? And, one of them picked up one of the cards. I think it was Virtuous Practices which is all about things like patience, helpfulness, gratitude, forgiveness, humility and hugging it to his chest, he said, “I want to put this in my pocket so that I can put it out and remind myself like a herb shelf, you know, remind myself what I’ve got and what I can pull off in the right moment, put it into the mix to help make things better when they’re getting sticky.” So, that was really nice.

Joe: Well, you know, my first thought of it was being able to take it as you talk about culture and to be able to separate them out and say, “Oh, we’re certainly not this. We certainly have authentic leadership.

We certainly develop high-quality connections, and our social capital isn’t very good at this company. We don’t have that.” And, kind of separate them out then kind of find out who you are as a company.

Sarah: I think that’s absolutely right and you can also do it in terms of what’s most important to us, or you can do it “What do we think are the success factors of our culture at the moment?” So, yeah, absolutely, for an organization to measure itself against these things.

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Joe: Yeah, I think it was quite intriguing. I played around with them a couple of different ways. It kind of determined who I was. I’m not going to tell you the results of that. You mentioned one of the outcomes.

Tell me one of the outcomes you’ve achieved with the cards.

Sarah: I use them as well when I’m doing more like training type workshops. So, I was in Australia recently, working with, in different settings actually with people not so much as a consultant producing a change in the organization, more helping other consultants and coaches to develop their practice.

Again, as I was trying to explain some of the concepts that perhaps are key to Appreciative Inquiry or Positive Psychology to mix things up a bit, some of the exercises were around like, for instance, taking the positive emotions again, kind of you start with a card and then see how many different positive emotions you can come up with. There’re only 5 or 6 on the card, so how can we expand this, what do we have in our lexicon, in our language around our positive emotions in the workplace. And then, the questions on the back ask about when they appear and so on. So, discuss the questions and, you know, and some of the outcomes are that people realize the whole, through limited language we have in organizations where there’re a lot of words like love and joy and other things that we don’t often use at work, and that led to an interesting discussion about love and the workplace. How compatible or incompatible are they and should we use other words in the workplace? And so, I don’t know if you would call that an outcome exactly but it takes the conversation in different directions, I guess.

Joe: I thought they were fairly stimulated on there. I’ve even tried to put one up on my desk each day since I received them just to give me something to look at during the day when I have a quiet moment or when I’m waiting for something and thinking, I could just kind of think about it.

Sarah: That is very nice. I mean, I’ll be honest with you. I produced these cards, created them and produced them, because I felt very driven to do so and it was something about producing a short, easy, portable version of the book that people didn’t have to necessarily understand and read on the background but could get the kind of key important things and they were the things that I’d learned about while writing the book that I thought was very important in terms of helping to create positive organizations. And then, it was a bit of a case of put it out there and see what people can do with them.

So, it was that you know, the Kevin Costner, build the field and create the field and they will come from the Field of Dreams sort of thing. You know, make the cards and people will find much more creative ways than I do to use them and you’ve just demonstrated that with the idea of using them as one a day ‘Thought for the Day’ sort of card. That’s a brilliant idea. So, I’m really hoping that other people will all use them and then, you know, join my Positive at Work LinkedIn group and let us know how they’re using them and what impact they’re having. They’ve certainly been popular.

When I was in Australia, had a lot of interest in them and I sold all the packs I took over with me and have had some orders, you know, since from people who’ve been in the workshops and could see how they could take them and apply them in their own organizations. And, these were people who were internal to their organizations, quite a lot of them, and having to take the cards and apply them in their Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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own organizations to stimulate conversations about things that just don’t get spoken about at the moment for whatever reason.

Joe: Are the cards available throughout the world, or are they just available in the UK or through you?

Sarah: At the moment, they’re available through me. I am hoping to get them up on Amazon at some point or at least I’m exploring getting them up on Amazon. Let’s put it that way. There’s an opening for someone because there is not that a that I can find anywhere, not a collective kind of web shop that promotes themselves, this kind of tools, not that I’ve managed to find. So, there are various others with our products, are aids to organizational development. No obvious central place to put them or to buy them. So, the short answer is at the moment you buy them through me; you can buy them directly through the website. It’s a different website address. It’s www.acukltd.com. If you look under resources, there’s a page for the cards, and you can order them directly through the website and then we will send them out to you. So, at the moment they do come from the UK, but I’m hoping of course in due course there will be more international distribution and possibly translated versions as well.

Joe: They came from your book, Positive Psychology, could you tell me a little bit of how, revisit how that book is doing and, you know, what’s been some of the comments about it.

Sarah: The book’s doing very well. It continues to sell well. Wherever I go, and people have it, I always get very good feedback on it which is really nice. And, on Amazon, it has 5-star ratings. One of the more memorable comments was somebody saying, “It’s jam-packed. It’s just jam-packed with good stuff.” By which I think they mean, I hope they mean it’s a nice mix of good research, you know, I tried to bring together the research in the field that was relevant to Positive Psychology at Work and then also includes lost of accounts of how people are using Positive Psychology at Work. So, both the research and the practical application and various people helped me out with many case studies of the work that they were doing, and I included some of my own and some of those case studies you referred to from the website as they’re explored in a bit more detail in the book, and I also tried to direct people to some of the supporting resources. So, where to find, for instance, strengths cards to support the work on strengths, some of the other books that I used that I think are really helpful in this work. So, that was that book, and I’m working now on a follow-up book as it were or a companion book which is Positive Psychology and Change, where I hope to showcase as it were some of the interesting things that I found out that I couldn’t get into the last book. I had a lot more about leadership and clearly obviously very much focused on the change aspect of organizational life.

Joe: I think there’s so much merit and of course your books are excellent. I want to ask you just a couple of questions about Appreciative Inquiry and Positive Psychology. I think it’s we’ve grown up solving problems. Leaders solve problems. So, that shift in thinking, every time I try, say I try to use strengthbased or positive psychology and put the good things, I understand I need to do that. When it really gets down to it, I still frame things in solving problems.

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Sarah: And, there’s nothing wrong with framing things in solving problems, and if doing that solves your problem, then that’s great. So, if I’ve got a problem of how to get from A to B from London to Leeds by a certain time, that’s a logical problem. I have to find out what trains are running and how long it takes when you get organized and out of the house and all the rest of it, of what weather conditions are like, so how likely is the train going to arrive on time. That’s all problem-solving which is absolutely right for that kind of problem. That’s the way to do it. The challenge arises when organizations are trying to apply that type of problem-solving to a much more complex social challenge. So, when organizations want to apply a logical problem solving to changing the culture that’s when they tend to run into trouble because culture, as we know, is about how people behave and how people behave is about how they understand the world which is about their mental maps. It’s about their social relations and these things if you want to create change in those areas you have to come at it from the psychology of people which is about interest and motivation and connection and communication and vision and values and all those kinds of things rather than the logical persuasion element.

Joe: Most decisions are still based on emotions, right? I mean that’s what we…

Sarah: Well, they are, they are. Absolutely, but a lot of the time we don’t have to worry about that too much because the problem-solving is sufficiently unemotional. The problem we’re trying to solve it doesn’t set off a whole lot of emotions. But, if you’re talking about changing people’s workplace, changing whom they work with, changing the identity of the organization then you’re affecting things that people do get emotional about, their sense of competency, their sense of identity, their sense of being valued, their ability to succeed and quite often their friendship networks, their work friendship networks. So, you’re in a much more emotional terrain, and exactly as you say, you need to kind of acknowledge that and come at it somewhat differently. It’s a classification problem as it were people were misclassified. A lot the change they wanted to achieve in the organization as being the same as a logic problem, and it’s not, it’s a people challenge.

Joe: So, I really need to take a step back, you know, before proceeding and look at who’s involved and what people there and really my best outcomes on how to get there isn’t necessarily going to be, the speediest way may not be in solving issues, it may be in looking at our strengths at what we can foster or what we can promote in our strengths.

Sarah: Yes, and the quickest way is to get hold of the idea that it’s not about having the answers, it’s about asking good questions over a group of people whom you want to change in some way. Everybody starts with a problem definition. It’s just the way we’re built. “Oh, my problem is, this team doesn’t work, or we need to change the culture or whatever it is.” But, the next thing is thinking about how to do I, exactly as you say, work with this group of people in a way that allows them to change their behavior and if you can draw out the motivation by helping people shift their mental models of how the world works, their understanding then the work is being done for you. You know, too many leaders feel that they have to have all the answers to an emerging situation which is impossible and also that they have to inject all the energy in the system for change. Both of which are, you know, the fast track to, Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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well, a very overworked person shall we say.

Whereas making that switch around and realizing I’ve got a great resource here, all these people who are going to be affected by this if I involve them early on by asking questions that will affect the way they think then we’re going to move more slowly, to begin with but faster later on. So, the challenge with change often is the easiest thing to do it looks like is to solve it yourself and then tell everybody else what’s going to happen. That seems fast, and that seems easy. But, the downside is you didn’t get into that whole conversation about selling the change to people and overcoming resistance. Whereas, if you start much more slowly and involved everybody in understanding as you do why things need to change, not by telling them but by drawing out their awareness so that they begin to fit, “Oh yeah, you know, I need to do something different. Things are changing. The world’s moving on, etc.” Then, they’ll be a gathering momentum which you can then help shape and guide and so on to move the situation forward.

Joe: Your cards are divided into 4 different classifications. Why is that and tell me a little bit about them classifications?

Sarah: I thought it would be helpful to try to sort of, as you say, classify the cards a little bit to make it perhaps a bit more manageable if people just wanted to focus on one particular aspect and also to help give them a little bit more towards perhaps working with an individual, working with a team or working with an organization. So, if you’re a leader you want to work with people on their kind of personal impact, how as an individual in an organization you have an impact across the system, be one of those people who are highly influential for good without wearing yourself out. Then, these are the sort of things you need to be looking at. So, flow is one of them. So, we know that when people are in flow, they’re likely to be using their strengths, be very productive, be very focused, very engaged. So, that’s the kind of, something you might want to acknowledge; you might want to use with an individual when you’re thinking about helping them feel engaged and motivated at work. When do they experience Flow?

In terms of influencing others, we’ve got positive energy network, networks, and high-quality connections. So, both of these are about how very impactful people, two things, one, they’re able to use like micro-moments, so small moments of contact with others to create something, move something on, shift something slightly, so they don’t, no interaction is wasted. It’s all generative. It all helps create something better. They just have the ability to recognize that even a 5-minute conversation can be lifechanging, from the very least can be impactful in the organization. And then, the positive energy network thing is about people who have that ability to create a good aura or a good mood amongst the group, and they’re very valuable, very valuable because people want to be around them. People like working with them. And, if you have a good positive energy person, they, people will be attracted to come and do maybe some work that isn’t top of their list but it needs doing and not many people have got the skills but they want to do it because they want to be, if Joe was in the gang, then I was to be there because we have a good time on project’s where Joe’s part of the team. If he’s on that project, Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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then it moves up my list of things I’m interested in doing so that would be sort of, you know, how you might use the blue ones.

Whereas, the cultural strengths, the pink ones, are much more about how do we want to think, what do we want to develop within our organization on a cultural basis? They’re based a lot on the work of Kim Cameron, from America, about what creates some of the most successful, well, what are some of the distinguishing features of some of the most successful and flourishing organizations. And so, they all must look at authentic leadership, obviously very key but also things like positive deviance which is ability of the organization to notice when the things are going exceptionally well and to learn from those experiences, as well as learning from when the experiences are when things are going exceptionally badly which obviously everyone pays attention to. But, not all organizations are so good at noticing when things are going particularly well in one department or division or under a particular leader and being interested in, well, what are they doing differently. Let’s go and find out what’s making it possible there because maybe the whole organization could benefit. Does that give you a bit of a flavor?

Joe: Yes. Yes, it does. I think it’s interesting because I go back like the Positive Deviance is really expanded on what’s working. It’s so important, especially to marketing and salest?

Sarah: Absolutely, absolutely. And, I had a fascinating conversation, coaching conversation not very long ago with someone who was very frustrated because he was a new manager, to be fair, and he’d inherited a couple of staffs, and he was very frustrated because one of his staff just wasn’t doing the job the way he wanted it to be done and thought it should be done. You know, and how could he change her behavior, so we talked about that for a bit. And then I said, I asked a question, something like “Tell me when this person has most impressed you in the time that you’ve been working with them.” So, that was a stop and think a moment, and he came up with something she’d done very early on when he first started managing her. He’d gone on a sales call with her, and she got the sale, you know, whatever sale it was, and he’d been very impressed. I said, “Great. How did she do that?” And, there was a long silence as he’d realized he’s never thought about it. He never thought to ask how she achieved her successes because he was too busy noticing that she wasn’t doing it the way he would have done it.

Joe: I think that’s so true because we seem to, instead of deriving what outcome or what target condition we want, we seem to concentrate on the way we want someone to do it.

Sarah: We see what we’re looking for, and he was looking for her using a company methodology I think, and that can stop us seeing what’s actually there and what’s…

Joe: How do you do that, Sarah? It’s that you have a tendency to frame things in that positive way so many times in that strength-based way to ask that question and is it just training and practice or how do I go about developing that skill better?

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Sarah: It’s something about, and it is exactly that. It is skill and practice, and it’s developing, some people, of course, have it naturally, but most of us don’t, it’s developing the appreciative eye and the appreciative ear. So, somehow you’re listening for and looking for ‘where’s the good here’, ‘what is working here’, ‘how did they do that’, ‘what resources are present in this situation that isn’t being recognized’, it’s just something about listening for the cues, and the other thing I guess is the key thing is the kind of which was what I used there, which is a bit of a flip. So, yeah, that’s what you don’t want, what is it you do want. So, if you don’t want to do that, you obviously, so I’m doing some of this in my head I guess, you obviously don’t want her behaving like that. You want her behaving successfully. Let’s see what we’ve got to work with. So, that’s the question about, you know, ‘when has she most impressed you.’ It’s the opposite to what we’re talking about which being deeply unimpressed. So, somehow just exploring, yeah, the other end of the same dimension almost.

Joe: I find that interesting because it’s something that I think is so innate with people, and I admire them so much when I and I do notice it. Well, I wish I would have framed it that way.

Sarah: There are, there are a lot of resources around them; in fact, one of the things I’m thinking of doing my next set of cards. I’ve got two in mind. One is a set of positive emotion cards because I find it’s a conversation not very well-developed in many of us. But, the other was a set of question cards just to, for exactly that reason really, to help people who are learning and working out how to frame things more appreciatively, more positively to move into different conversations. Just to give them those cue cards that they can have a hand or flip through before they go into a coaching session to sort of think about what might be a good question to ask or after a session thinking ‘what am I going to ask next time’ or whatever. But, that’s not available yet. But, there are lots of books and things on the web as well that will give a generic type of appreciative and positive questions you could start picking up and not you personally, anyone could start picking up and working with to expand the vocabulary of question.

Joe: What’s the best way to contact you, Sarah?

Sarah: SarahLewis@ and then it’s the new website address acukltd.com (sarahlewis@acukltd.com).

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Opening Appreciative Space Guest was John Steinbach John Steinbach has combined the approaches of Appreciative Inquiry and Open Space into his dynamic and positive Opening Appreciative Space process .This process starts with Appreciative Inquiry; a positive approach to change that can be used by individuals, teams, organizations, and communities. Through an interview process that focuses on strengths and high-point experiences, Appreciative Inquiry helps participants discover and create the desired future. This dynamic and uplifting process has been used by Fortune 500 companies, educational institutions, not-for-profit organizations, youth groups, world leaders, and communities.

John Steinbach has worked to Open Appreciative Space in a wide variety of organizations including GTE, Verizon, Hughes Electronics, Nationwide Insurance, Boeing, Raytheon, GE, Cardinal Health Systems, United Way, American Red Cross, Purdue Extensions services and dozens of nonprofits, churches and youth-serving organizations. John can be found at http://www.jpconsultantsinc.com.

Joe Dager: Welcome, everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of the Business 901 podcast. With me, today is John Steinbach. John has done training, design, and organizational development work with a variety of organizations for over 25 years. After using several approaches to change, John now focuses almost exclusively on a process he calls Opening Appreciative Space, which combines Appreciative Inquiry and Open Space. His variety of client bases includes GTE, Verizon, Hughes Electronics, Raytheon, GE, and many, many more. He has also worked in the area of youth leadership and was a founding member of Community Partnerships with Youth, which was funded primarily through the Lily Endowment. John is the founder of JP Consultants and more information about him, and his work can be found at www.JPConsultantsInc.com.

John, I'd like to welcome you and tell me a little about Opening Appreciative Space.

John Steinbach: Well, thanks a lot, Joe. It's going to be fun to talk about it. I'll start as if the listeners don't really have any background in either Appreciative Inquiry or Open Space. What I like to do is kind of give the founding stories of those two things, because that's what this Opening Appreciative Space is about is combining those approaches. Where Appreciative Inquiry comes from is the person primarily accredited with starting the approach is David Cooperrider, who was a graduate student at Case Western Reserve. And David is a very accomplished guy who studied many fields, and one of the things

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he had studied was kind of personal psychology, performance psychology, and he came up with something he calls the positive image/positive action connection.

The Olympics are going on now, so we see that all the time those athletes can have the tremendous physical ability, but really, the thing that can distinguish a good performance from a great one or a poor one is the image they carry of themselves as they go out to perform.

We've seen great athletes just flounder in the Olympics, because the pressure creates an image where they're stressed, and they don't see success. So we know that from lots of things; salespeople, performers of all types, their image kind of controls their level of activity. Make sense?

Joe: I think Olympics are a great example right now because when that moment of doubt surfaces in them before a performance, at that level, it's always telling.

John: We've seen it with some of the best. Michelle Kwan was one that she skated for years and should definitely be a gold medalist. She was just a wonderful Olympian and was close to it often, but it was something, she was just a little tight, and somebody else would go out there, and they would just be very loose and very confident. There's this whole approach with performance psychology where people work with these athletes, work with salespeople, whoever it is, to get their image to the point where they can maximize their ability. Cooperrider has studied that quite a bit, and now he's studying organizational change, organizational development. This is where the story really caught me because this is what I was doing.

He was given an assignment. The assignment was --just listen to these words; they're just really amazing and telling - to go to the Cleveland clinic and find out what's wrong with the human side of this organization. Now, the reason for that question is we have this assumption that to make something better, like human interaction in an organization; we've got to find out what's wrong and fix it.

Cooperrider started thinking of that in light of what he knew about performance psychology, and that's a positive image, positive actions, and so he thought, "This is just crazy. If I go into this organization and dig into what's wrong, ask them what's wrong, create a report about what's wrong, it will really highlight that image in their head of everything that's wrong with this organization."

As he looked at the Cleveland Clinic, it's a premier medical institution, one of the tops in the world, and he saw amazing people doing just incredible professional work and great teamwork - all the hallmarks of a really high functioning organization. He thought, "Why would I go in and ask them what's wrong?"

Instead, he kind of just stumbled into this approach where he created questions, and structures, and interview formats that explored the best of who they were - the high points in their experience of working together, the hopes they had for the future. He was looking at the top level of achievement, the top of the past, and then projecting that onto the future of how good they could be.

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When he did this, the people at the Cleveland Clinic were just amazed because they had worked with consultants before, and they were used to feel awful when the consultant leaves because usually, the consultant's job is to uncover everything that's wrong.

That's why I related to this so much. I was, at that time, a consultant who was helping people find out what was wrong with their organization, their department, and their team, whatever it was, "What's wrong here, so we can fix it?"

Cooperrider takes this very different approach. The people at the Cleveland Clinic are amazed. His advisers at Case are just kind of floored by this new approach. He writes a paper about it. He says, "If I were to name this something, I would call it Appreciative Inquiry." That's where the name comes from and the approach, which is developed and been used in thousands of organizations and communities all over the world.

That's kind of the founding piece of it. I think to understand it; you really need to look at the two words and the appreciative part of it kind of has two meanings. One is, as in art appreciation, where you look at something, and you learn to appreciate that art by developing a better sensitivity of what makes the art great, the same with music appreciation or anything with the Olympics.

I mean; there are some people watching the gymnast who can see every little thing they do well because they understand that sport. Other people, it's just like, "Oh, that was nice." So part of it is that sense of appreciation and refining our vision of what's great about the organization, community, or whatever.

The other part of that is to appreciate in value as in appreciating a home in value, which can happen over time, or because we put care into it, put attention into it. Or, at least when I talk to groups now, I say, "It used to happen;" and "Remember when houses appreciated in value?" It's kind of a touchy subject.

What he found is if you have these inquiries, the second part of Appreciative Inquiry, the name, if you have questions that allow people to have conversations that one, help them appreciate what is good, and strong, and the best, and the talents, and all those things about the organization, about the community or whatever -- those inquiries, those questions will help them appreciate those things, and they will appreciate in value. That's the first part of this Opening Appreciative Space, is Appreciative Inquiry. So like I do with the group when I explain that far, and I tell that story, I usually just pause and say, "What do you think? Does that ring any bells for you? Had you experienced consultants who were practicing like me, John Steinbach, before Appreciative Inquiry, who came in and dug up all the dirt, might have made morale worse, might have made the situation worse?"

I tell groups that the amazing thing was they always paid me. I never had somebody say, "You almost destroyed our organization; we're not paying you." But I felt like I almost destroyed their organization.

Then, I saw this other approach, and I said, "Well, this makes absolute sense as a better way to approach making things better."

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Joe: Well, I think that's good. We have all the good touchy-feely stuff, but let's say from a process methodology point of view, how do you fix anything?

John: Well, it's interesting that when the mentality starts with, "We're going to fix something. We're focusing on what we're going to fix," When the mentality is more we're going to find what's really good and strong about this organization and move toward that -- two things happen with fixing things that I find. One is they fall away, and they're not noticed anymore. One of the examples I've seen a lot is pettiness within a group. They'll be like, "Oh, the office politics, the talking about people; all that is just terrible." They think that that's what we're going to go into, but instead when we go here and talk about when that organization is at its best, when that department's at its best, and they change the conversation, that thing that had been plaguing them for so long tends to fall away, or at least diminish so much in importance and energy, that it's not so much of a problem anymore.

The other piece of it is that when we look at those things that are the high point experience, the story of the organization changes. It becomes a story of how good we are in our capabilities versus how bad we are.

Now, with that said, there's definitely time for problem-solving. And that's around technical problems.

That's around process things, as you said, perhaps, where it's a fairly technical thing. Appreciative Inquiry is more for human interactions, team building, morale, things like that; that really grow out of the interactions people have and the image they have of the organization and the human dynamics, what they call it.

Joe: I think that's a good point, well made, John, is that separation from process to people. Could you tell me a bit about Open Space?

John: Well, Open Space is something that Harrison Owen - just like David Cooperrider's the name associated with Appreciative Inquiry - Harrison Owen is the guy who got Open Space rolling. Open Space was a discovery he had of being somebody that would organize conferences and very typical type of meetings that we've all been to, where you might have keynote speakers in concurrent sessions and an agenda that's been hammered out. Everything's going to run precisely. We're to-the-minute planning these things out. And you know, "If the food's three minutes late -- oh, my gosh! Everything's thrown off." He did a conference like that once, and as he was looking at the evaluations, he kept noticing that people would say the best part of the conference was the coffee breaks. His initial reaction was, "How can they say that? I put all this time into this; all the other organizers put time into making it this wellrun machine, and they like the coffee breaks." Again, as I do with a group, I'll just ask you, "What's so great about a coffee break at a conference?"

Joe: I think a great point is you get to talk to your peers about similar subject matters.

John: Mm-hmm, yeah. And who determines what you're talking about?

Joe: Oh, we do. I do. They do.

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John: Right. Unlike the conference, where it's a group of people deciding what -- out of these 100 or 5,000 people or however many are going to gather -- do they want to hear about, do they want to talk about. They're selecting the agenda. So what Harrison went to develop and started thinking about was, "How could you create something with the energy of a coffee break, the dynamic of a coffee break, but with a little intentionality and structure?"

You need enough intentionality and structure to give form to it, but not so much that it stifles those things that are in a coffee break. So this one is, I think, really hard to understand and visualize until you've seen it in action, but I'll try to do this with just this herbal thing we've got going with the podcast.

The group shows up, and they're sitting in a big circle. It's a big circle of chairs with no tables in front of them. The reason you've got a circle is there's no top; there's no bottom, there's no hierarchy.

Everybody's in a big circle.

In the middle of the circle is a table with flip-chart paper. On the wall, there's a matrix, and the matrix is to show time and space. Imagine if you will a matrix where we have, down the left side of it, say, one through five, and across the top, A through E. One through five would be five different sections in time we're going to have, and A through E would be the places where people will meet during those times. So we've got whatever that comes up to, 25, 30 - I don't know what the math would be on that one - different session, but it's a blank matrix.

We bring the group together, and there's a convening question. The question might be something like how to give the most phenomenal customer service possible in our organization. The topics to be posted are the things that people want to talk about to move towards that particular goal of this great customer service.

There's a little bit of introduction. The introduction is, for one thing, saying there're two pieces that really run this, passion and responsibility. If you have a passion for something, you're going to write it on a piece of flipchart paper and say, "I want to have a meeting about this." If you have a passion for something, you are going to take responsibility for getting it on that piece of paper and getting it up there.

If you don't, well, you have the opportunity to do it because the agenda is open within the topic we're convening on. There's an introduction to it; there're a few guidelines, and then space is open. What that means is, "OK, everybody, there're some flip chart paper and markers. Come out here, write your topics.

Announce them to the group so they can ask any questions they've got, hear a little explanation, and you post it at the time and space where you want to have this meeting."

It's really interesting to do. I've done this with communities, with hundreds of people in communities.

I've done it with very hierarchical organizations; very technical organizations -- Boeing, Raytheon, organizations like that where it's all engineers. I've done it with faculties at universities, and sometimes people just sit there for a bit. Nothing happens.

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In that case, I'll just say, "You know, there's no alternative plan." I'll sit there again and eventually somebody will get up; they'll post the first topic, and then it just flows out of that. Other times, as soon as I say space is open, there are five people lined up, and they're ready to go. But I've never seen it when that agenda does not get filled up and almost always we have to create more times or spaces to accommodate all the things that people want to talk about.

That's the way open spaces structured and looks. For listeners, you can go and search Open Space. You can go to Open Space World, which has a ton of information about it and some diagrams and outlines with what the guidelines are and so forth, but that's the structure of it.

Joe: Could you kind of outline how you use this in business?

John: There have been lots of different applications in business. One of them I mentioned with Raytheon and Boeing. They were working a particular project where one of them was the main contractor and the other subcontractor. It was, "How are we going to work together to get this particular project to flow the best way possible, to be able to communicate the best way possible, to get our specs right, so we know that we're doing the right work?" This was addressing not the process type of things that we might be able to fix a little bit with very technical things, but "How are we going to interact as a team? How are we going to work the best possibilities?" They came up with those topics and figured out the way they wanted to work.

There's kind of natural selection of that that if somebody is really passionate about making that thing happen, and you, Joe Dager, posted it or me, John Steinbach, or whoever, posted it, and we want to make sure it happens - you, or I, or whoever; we have a responsibility to push that thing forward.

The hierarchy in the organization has a responsibility for making space, after the Open Space event, to allow those things to happen. That is one of the things I really am fascinated about with Open Space, is working with organizations so that after all the energy of that meeting, which is tremendously energetic, the organization has the capacity to absorb the creativity that comes out of the session.

Another example of using it in business is one that I really liked; it was an accounting firm called -, and I still get the calls. The calls that I usually get are not, "Hi John. Could you come do Appreciate Inquiry and focus on our strengths?" It's, "Hi John. We have problems. Could you come fix them?" In this case, their problem was twofold - low morale and high turnover.

Not only did they have a problem; they had a solution. The solution they had was a mentoring program.

So I said, "Let's not just focus on a solution to the problem, but let's look at that thing you brought, which is low morale and high turnover. First, let's do Appreciate Inquiry, and we're going to ask, not, 'Why is morale so low, and why is turnover so high?' But, 'When morale is at its best,' because there are times it's higher than other times, '...what's going on that makes morale high?'"

"In other organizations that you've been in, what makes morale high? When you look around and say, 'We could do this, and it would raise morale,' what kind of things do you envision? When you think of Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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high turnover, let's not ask, 'Why is there high turnover?' Let's ask, 'What makes people stay as long as they do, and what will make them stay even longer?'" We have a conversation that's all about creating a vision, the image, for high morale and increased retention.

Joe: What do you do with the negative comments? There has to be because that's how we're used to thinking.

John: You don't fight it. I try to get that across in my presentation that part of what you're doing - if I sit down, and I'm doing an appreciative inquiry interview with somebody, and they're just really negative - we made a big effort in the zip code I live in, and it's a wonderful place to live, and also, it has a lot of foreclosures, people will talk about crime; we've lost businesses, whatever. Some of the people just want to talk about that. That's what they want to talk about. You don't fight it, but what you can do is, you take it, and this is really, I think, a concept that people find so valuable if they start to use it, is any negative that a person has. If you think of a coin, the opposite side of that coin is a positive image that's frustrated.

So they're saying, "This part of town, the housing is just deteriorating, and we see more crime," and whatever it is, and you say, "It sounds like you're really concerned about that. What is it that you want to see this neighborhood look like and feel like? Let's talk about that. Have you seen some steps, either here or other places that help move toward that?"

You're acknowledging, "Yeah, I understand that you don't like this. Now, the opposite side of what you don't like is what you want to see. Let's talk about that." I think every group I've ever worked with; they can see how much more effective that is, because they've been involved in so many efforts that focus entirely on the negatives and the problems.

We're not saying, "Deny the problems," we're not saying, "Don't allow them to surface," just asking people to try to skillfully flip it when they do surface, to say, "OK, I get that. Now what is it you want to see, and have you seen some of it, and how can we move to more of it?" "Your organization with low morale, we could've talked about why there was low morale until the cows came home. Instead..."

I acknowledge that up front from when we started the effort. I said, "I got called in to examine low morale. We're not going to do that. The reason is I think if we examine low morale, we're going to have lower morale when we're done. We're going to examine what there is that makes morale as high as it is, how to take it higher and get those ideas flowing."

It's a tricky thing. If you fight the negatives, they just gain energy, but if you accept them, and then help people look for what they want, in almost all cases, they will cooperate with that.

Joe: The Open Space part of this, "We're looking at the appreciative side, and we're doing that, and we're putting these things up on the board," and everything, but then the Open Space, does everybody get in a circle and hold hands, and chant? What do we do?

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John: You can hold hands if you want. It depends on who's next to you if you want to, but it's... They get in a circle... See, this where this opening Appreciative Space is different from Appreciative Inquiry and different than Open Space. I honor both of those, I acknowledge those, but what I do is... I gave the reference for Open Space world; there's something called the AI Commons, so if somebody searches for AI Commons or Appreciative Inquiry, you'll find tons of information, and you'll find that there's something called the 5-D Model. What that means is you define what you're going to inquire into, it could be the morale. You go ahead and have that interview process, which is called the discover part of the process.

So you talk and have these interviews, and then you go to the dream phase, and that's really articulating the vision. After the interview is where I part from Appreciative Inquiry. The rest of it, in my experience, was very much wordsmithing. It is where you're coming up with these things that are called provocative propositions. They're very language-heavy. They're like affirmations and goals, but often nothing happened, other than coming up with that language.

So we define what we want to talk about. We do the interviews, which are a one-on-one process to surface things like, "How can morale be even higher? Why is it as high as it is? Where can we go in the future?"

Then, after they've had those individual conversations and got the ideas flowing, got the juices flowing, you get into that circle, and you say, "No doubt, you've got lots of things to talk about from these interviews, and you've got some wonderful things to explore. Now, we're going into this thing called Open Space where you have the opportunity to do that."

That's where I move from Appreciative Inquiry to the Open Space. Open Space people would say, "Well, just forget the Appreciative Inquiry; Open Space will do it all for you." I somewhat agree, but what I've found is by starting with the Appreciative Inquiry, it brings people into that Open Space with a reference point that says, "We're going to talk about how to move forward, how to make things better, how to build on what is good, versus we're going to talk about how terrible things are, how bad they were in the past, and how hopeless it all is." It really sets the tone for the whole Open Space session.

Joe: Can you do this in a larger group setting? Can this be an entire conference in itself?

John: There're been lots of conferences that are done like this. The last large organization I worked with was some work with Nationwide Insurance, and a woman came up to me and said, "At my professional conference," and I forget what her professional conference is; I think it was something fairly technical, she said, "...we did the last conference with Open Space." I was kind of holding my breath and thinking, "Now, is she going to say, 'it was just terrible'?" I said, "What did you think?" She said, "It was the most wonderful thing. I thought, 'Why did we ever do it differently?'" That has always been what I hear from people.

A friend of mine - and she was a client before she was a friend of mine - was the executive director of the YWCA in Fort Wayne. The YWCA, years ago, really went to examine its mission and figure out who Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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they were. They had the people that were the directors, the board members, from YWCAs from all around the country. I think it was 5,000 people or something, this huge group. That's what they did.

They used Open Space to reinvent who they were, and by the end of it, they had reinvented who they were, and I guess it was drastically different from what they started with.

Not only can it be used with large groups, but it can also be used with very contentious issues. One of Harrison Owen's examples that he cites is one of the first times he used it in a big setting was with environmentalist and forest industry people in the west. The convening issue was something like, "How do we protect the environment and at the same time maximize the economic benefits of forestry?"

These are people that hate each other.

Joe: That's what I was going to say. You can get opposing groups that have this wall between them?

John: Well, think about what you're walking into, though, because usually, what would happen in a conference like that is some group would have set the agenda, and they would have said, "We're going to talk about this from 9:00 to 9:15, this from 9:20 to..." And right away; people would be going, "Who decided that was the most important thing? This is biased towards the environmental people. This is biased towards the..." Instead, you're saying, "OK, we come from very different perspectives; we're sitting around this room now; everybody has access to that agenda that has nothing on it other than the convening topic. That's all we know. We're going to talk about this topic. You post what you believe in the most."

And then, a very important part of that is people go where they have a passion. So if there're five concurrent meetings going on and there is tremendous passion around one of those meetings, and let's say we've got 100 people and 90 of them go to one meeting, that's fine. If they all go and balance 20 at each one or whatever, that's fine, too.

But there's no segmenting the group to say, "We need another person here, another person here." You go where you are passionate to talk about something. If it's the wrong place, once you get there, or if you just learned all you can, there's one law, and it's called the law of two feet. The law of two feet says if you're not learning or contributing where you are, move.

Imagine this group. We've got six concurrent sessions going on. You go to a session; you get what you wanted out of it, you find out it's not what you thought it would be, whatever the reason; you simply move. No reason to apologize. It's just the way the process works.

Joe: Isn't that how Congress is supposed to work?

John: I don't know how Congress is supposed to work. I would love to do an Open Space session with Congress if there was some promise that it would never be in the media, and there was absolute secrecy. Because I think that part of it, it gets to, I think, the really good intentions of people by saying, "There're no restrictions here. If you care about something, bring it up." And you are not forced to go to anything you don't want to talk about. However, you articulate your topic the way that you think it's Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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most productive, and then you see who comes. And one of the really interesting experiences with that is sometimes, you know; somebody will post a topic, and they go, and they're sitting there waiting, and nobody comes.

This is one of the few kinds of interventions. I'll do once the process starts. I'll walk over to that person and just say, "Hmm, what do you make of this?" And they're like, "I don't know." I answer, "Well, what could you make of it?" And they'll say, "Well, nobody's interested." I'll say, "You know, maybe you're so far ahead of your time they just haven't caught on yet."

We just talk and say, "OK, you've got a choice. You can sit here and be a group of one, and you can think through this and put notes together and do all those things, but it's up to you what you do." So if we take Congress and we unleash them from being Democrats and Republicans, conservative and liberal, Fox News and MSNBC, or whatever it is, and could get past that, you know, maybe I'm naĂŻve, but I believe underneath that there's an intelligence that would work on these things. I think with the structure the way it is now; it's almost impossible to get to.

Joe: Well, the reason I bring that up is that there are real definitive lines and in organizations. There's a defined hierarchy culture that's there, these things exist. The government is the exaggeration of trying to make it work, but organizations are not that much different sometimes. When I say, "How does it work?" I mean, can we really make it work?

John: By "make it work," I wouldn't say that it's perfect, and it creates paradise or anything like that, or that it gets around all the organizational hierarchy. That is still a mess. The best clients I have are ones that will take the time with me before we do this Appreciative Inquiry Open Space, this Open and Appreciative Space, and I say, "Here's what's going to happen." And this is a department head, the president of the university, CEO, whatever level I'm working with, "You are going to unleash a whole lot of creativity and passion. Now, if you can accommodate that, this is a wonderful thing. If you can't or don't want to accommodate that, I recommend we don't do this, because you're creating some realistic expectations."

And I've had clients that really hear that and say, "OK, how can we address this, and they make it clear that they're trying to work around, though, past, whatever it is those organization hierarchies and everything else that is there.

At the same time, those things have to be respected, because that department head is the person who is ultimately responsible for that budget that year, either being on a budget, over budget or whatever.

So they might say, "Yeah, we can pursue some of these ideas."

I've had organizations that say, "There's $500 per idea that, if you give the time to do it, you go spend that money," or it's $1,000, or whatever. "I'm saying you can use your time on the clock to do these things," and they find a way to work with that, but that's really a challenge because most organizations don't know how potent these things are.

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A couple of examples, I think, will come up, but there's one that comes to mind right away. I was working with a small college, and the president of the college had brought me in. It was morale and communication, all the usual stuff, and from talking to a couple of people, I said, "Usually, I want everybody in the Open Space, but I'm going to ask you this time not to be there." "Why?" I said, "Well, from what I hear, your presence might stifle the conversation." "Oh, no, no, no. Not at all."

I said, "No, I think so, and we're going to work with you of how to hear the ideas that come out of this, too." So we worked through all this; we're doing the Open Space; there's all this energy in the room, and suddenly, it’s like some scene from a movie where this silence just goes from one end of the room to the other in a weird way.

I see this going on, and I look, and I see everybody's eyes pointing toward this door, and the president of the university has walked in, and it just shuts down. He went, "Oh, hi. I just wanted to say, 'Hi.' See you later," and backed out. When we talked about it later, he said, "John, I had no idea, but I saw what happened."

There are times where you have to work with that organizational hierarchy and the dynamics of maybe removing a person for a little bit of time. There are times I coached the leaders to say, "You know; I know that you really want to have a mentoring program with an example of high morale. I really recommend none of the partners in this accounting firm post that. Let one of your junior accountants post it if they want it."

Sure enough, one of the junior accountants, one of the first things they posted was, "We want a mentoring program." The dynamic was so different with them posting it and pursuing it, versus the leaders posting it and saying, "This is a good idea for you guys."

Joe: It reminds me a little bit of Jack Welch's workout program. Is there any similarity, or am I off the wall?

John: No. I think Jack Welch's workout program was a lot like that. It was trying to integrate something like that in a structural way ongoing into the organization. The best of those programs are ones where there are no sacred cows. That's part of what he was trying to do. You go after what you want to go after. I worked with GE during that time and did some work. I didn't work specifically with the workout program. So I'm not speaking as somebody that was involved in it. But what I know of it, it is very similar.

It is a different dynamic with Open Space though. What something like Workout is trying to do, and this is what most fascinates me now, is I see how Appreciative Inquiry and Open Space can work and how they can work in this combined Opening Appreciative Space approach that I use.

But then, it's the next challenge of, how do you create an organization that runs more and more by this model? And a lot of it just happens naturally. People will tell me. Clients will say, after that, we started doing this, this, and this, that integrated those particular things from Appreciative Inquiry and the Open Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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Space. But I think something like Workout is an attempt to drive those things into the organization.

There was a tremendous success with that program.

Joe: From an organizational standpoint and a business standpoint, that's something a lot of people relate to. What are your plans for this venture? How do you get involved in an approach like this? How do organizations get involved?

John: So far, my experiences with organizations being involved are they come with the traditional thing to somebody like me and say, "We've got a problem. Can you help us fix it?" It's kind of like going to the doctor and saying, "I've got a heart problem." And the doctor says, "OK. We're going to get you on an exercise regime. We're going to get your diet in shape. We're going to do all the positive things, rather than just go there and start working on that heart."

They come with heart disease, and we end up saying, "Let's look at the lifestyle of this organization and look at it with these very dynamic approaches." Quite often, they come in that way. They also come often after the other approaches fail.

I've worked with community involvement efforts like that many times where they start a community improvement effort by listing all the terrible things about the community. It creates tremendous alienation, and it decreases morale. Nobody wants to be involved.

Then it's like, "How can we do this a different way?" They come across something like Appreciative Inquiry. I think it's - in a lot of ways - it's once they get exposed to it; it's "Take the dive. Jump in there and see how it works for your organization."

As far as getting trained on it or something like that, I did most of my training through NTL, National Training Labs. I still believe they have a strong Appreciative Inquiry program. There's something called the Taos Institute, which has also got a good program.

One of the things I'm looking at is starting to try to do some work in a more virtual way with people.

Because when I have done training to bring people together for three days or something, it can be expensive with travel time and all those things. Then they go back, and they are like, "That sounded so great, but now I've got to apply it." And they feel lost.

Many people need coaching or support all the way through the process. I am investigating Skype or other types of virtual settings to help this spread because I think it is very powerful. How do we get it into more organizations, more communities, more schools, lots of places?

Joe: Is there something you'd like to add that maybe I didn't ask?

John: I don't know if it's so much that you didn't ask, but there's a couple of other examples I think I want to give that can give a sense of, especially the Appreciative Inquiry part of it. One of my favorite things I've done is I've had some opportunity to work with young people and what we'll call the elders.

Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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The young people were quite often from what we call challenged backgrounds or something. The term used to be at-risk youth, which I always hated, but those were the programs I'd work with. So there were times where I would bring in elders, and they would be volunteers in the community or something and people in their 60s, 70s, 80s.

We would pair them up, and these teenagers would have exactly the same questions to ask the elders as the elders would ask the teenagers. The questions were things like, "What are some high points in your life that really stand out? What's the time you were really proud of yourself? What's your greatest contribution you've made to your community. However, you define a community? What are your hopes for the future?"

Now, the important thing with that is the young person is asking exactly the same questions of the elder as the elder is asking of the young person. We've put them on the same footing. And the relationships that would come out of that were just amazing.

Quite often it would be relationships with some kids who look really rough around the edges and some very sweet-looking, bingo playing, old ladies who came in, and you'd look and go, "Oh, how will these two get along?" With that guideline of that conversation, they got along wonderfully.

Another example that just is always very touching to me is I did work with an organization that serves the adult developmentally disabled. In a situation like that, they'll be in an interview format and like the board members; the staff will go out and interview clients and parents of clients and community members to find out about the organization.

When we processed what they found out, one of the board members said - the first thing anybody said was this board member who said, "I found out how important our bus drivers are." I said, "Well, what do you mean by that?" "Well, I talked to this parent of this adult client of ours, and she said, 'Your bus drivers are just so important in his life. When that bus pulls up, and that door opens, his face and his world are transformed.'"

I would venture to say that most organizations like that do not know the value of their bus drivers. You get the same thing with the value of the person who works the front desk at the hotel, the janitor, all these different people that emerge through these stories that people hear on Appreciative Inquiry, where there's a tremendous value that wasn't placed there - placed on what they do and who they are. I just want to get that piece of it across.

The other thing I'd say is if somebody listens to this, and they say, "Yeah, sure, but it wouldn't work in my organization," really think about things like the environmentalist and the forest and the timber people. Think about the engineers at Boeing and Raytheon. I've worked with. I've worked in very tense situations in communities.

I haven't found the place, the population, where this doesn't work. What I found over and over is people get it right away because they're so tired of trying to make things better by looking at how bad things Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

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are. They're tired of going to meetings where somebody else has structured the agenda that the combined energy of this appreciative approach and the open space is just so refreshing to people.

Joe: Thank you very much, John. I appreciate it. What's the best way for someone to get a hold of you?

John: Well, you mentioned my website earlier, www.jpconsultantsinc.com. My email is john@jpconsultantsinc.com. Thank you very much, Joe. It's been a pleasure.

Lean Marketing, Action Research, Appreciative Inquiry Lean how to become "Part of a Market" vs. "Marketing to a Market" Joe Dager is a Freelance practitioner that specializes in Service Design and Sales and Marketing. Most of his recent work has been in SaaS discipline working with organizations in the Business Development area and to onboard external groups such as affiliate, re-sellers, and reward programs.

Joe has managed and worked closely with sales and marketing teams and even been that department for some. He has hands-on experience in the implementation of marketing strategies to include direct and indirect sales development. Joe is well-versed in digital marketing and the traditional marketing concepts of lead generation, advertising, and public relations.

This is the initial steps used to create a Strategic Strength-Based Marketing Outline. It ensures we carefully think through what we want and can create and whom we have to involve within our sphere of influence to guarantee success. Connecting people through a positive mindset approach or an Appreciative Inquiry view always focusing on those positive steps.

The starting point is based on the 5 Ds of Appreciative Inquiry: 1. Define – What is the focus of inquiry?. What will define our purpose, content, and what needs to be achieved?

2. Discover – Appreciating the best of “what is” What are we presently doing, and how does our customer feel about it? What makes up our strengths and periods of excellence?

3. Dream – Imagining “what could be” Using past achievements and successes identify new possibilities and envision a preferred future.

4. Design – Determining “what should be” – Bring together the stories from discovery with the imagination and creativity from dream.

5. Destiny – Creating “what will be” Identify how the design is delivered, and how it’s embedded into groups, communities, and organizations.

Note: These are transcriptions of a podcast. They have not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

https://business901.com