Sarah Lewis’s new Positive Organizational Developmen
t Cards offer an engaging and playful way of introducing exciting positive development ideas to individuals, teams and organizations. Sarah and her organization, Appreciating Change aim is to achieve whole system change, with positive and creative solutions working through psychological processes such as emotional engagement, the creative imagination, core values and key strengths.
Sarah describes her cards below in an excerpt from our recent podcast. The podcast and transcription can be found at, A Positive Approach to Organizational Change.
Joe: Can you use the cards to kind of frame a conversation that you might have?
Sarah: I tend to use them more with groups at the moment. So, as you know, in each of the cards the 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 worry stage about creating lists for something rather.
And then, there’s another question, ‘What are the most important 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. 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. There’re a few kind 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.
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