Sara Orem 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 Orem is the co-author of Appreciative Coaching: A Positive Process for Change (Jossey-Bass Business & Management).
In a conversation with Sara, I asked, What are some of the pushbacks that you get when first using Appreciative Inquiry? Is there or do you just approach it positively that it’s really not a pushback?
Sarah: 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 sales person 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 much harder?edged 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 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.
Transcription and Podcast: Accentuate the Positive with Sara Orem
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