Sarah Lewis’s passion is working with organizations to achieve transformational change using participative, collaborative methods such as Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, World Café and SimuReal. 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. These approaches minimizes the challenges of resistance to change and getting buy-in.
An excerpt from next weeks podcast:
Joe: One of the things that intrigues me on your website is the brief case 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 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. 
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.
Previous Podcast and Transcription with Sarah Lewis: Mastering Positive Change
In the podcast we introduce Sarah’s new Positive Organizational Development Cards. They offer an engaging and playful way of introducing exciting positive development ideas to individuals, teams and organizations.
Lean Sales and Marketing: Learn about using CAP-Do