Positive Change: Learning the Lesson of the Typewriter and the Dinosaurs
Will Trevor
Vice Provost for Online Strategy and TC Academy | Lecturer | PhD Candidate | Professional Certified Marketer (PCM?) | TEDx Speaker [20k+ Connections]
What has the typewriter industry got in common with the dinosaurs? Both of them faced change, failed to adapt in the face of that change, and then became extinct. As businesses, when we are faced with ever-increasing change, is there a more positive way to approach and embrace it that helps us evolve, like Google or Apple, rather than go the way of the dinosaurs and the typewriter? This article is going to take a look at Appreciative Inquiry, as a positive approach to meeting the challenges of change.
All organizations face change, whether it is something that is imposed from outside, such as economic change, or initiated from within by management. No organization, however, can survive in today’s evolving world without understanding what is changing and what needs to be changed.
The typewriter industry disappeared, for example, because its major players failed to understand how word processors and the PC had changed the world they inhabited. Organizations like Apple and Google, on the other hand, seem to breed a culture that both embraces and leads change.
Why is the Response to Change so Often Negative?
Change can often be viewed in negative terms by organizations and their employees and rather than trying to understand and evolve in the face of change, rather they try and resist and ignore the forces shaping their industry or markets.
Too often the reaction to change, where change is acknowledged, is to focus on the negatives and to react in a way that highlights what is wrong with the organization and its people and results in redundancies or restructures – often punishing the people within the organization, for the lack of strategic foresight from those at the top.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
In 1987, David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastra developed a different way of analysing change, which enables an organization to embrace decision-making and strategic change from a more positive perspective. They criticised the traditional problem-solving approach as focusing too much upon the negatives, rather than focusing upon new opportunities and forms of organization. That approach is known as Appreciative Inquiry, or ‘AI’ for short.
The Deficiencies of Problem-solving
The traditional problem-solving model, according to Cooperrider and Srivastra, focuses upon what is called a ‘deficiency’ model, which encourages managers and consultants to ask questions such as:
- What are the problems that we are facing?
- What is wrong with the organization?
- What are the issues that need to be fixed?
AI practitioners, however, see this as symptomatic of an approach that encourages a negative and short-termist perspective of the organization and its response to change.
Instead AI advocates will focus upon what is already positive and effective within the organization, providing a springboard to what the organization and its people could become, rather than focusing upon what the organization is not. AI flips the traditional problem-solving model on its head and views it more from the strengths side of the SWOT, rather than the weaknesses.
How do we use Appreciative Inquiry?
The most common model for applying AI is the 4D-Model, which provides a framework for analysing the organization and the changes that it faces:
- Discover – focus upon the practices and the processes that the organization does well: what are we good at?
- Dream – envision what it is the organization could be in the future: how does our vision inform what we want to be?
- Design – plan and develop the processes that will enable the achievement of that vision.
- Deploy – take that design and implement it to achieve that vision.
While this only touches upon the surface of what AI does and how it achieves its goals, its overriding aim is to build up or re-build the organization upon the positive foundations of today, rather than disassemble it in the face of our current perceived problems.
Maybe if the typewriter industry of yesteryear had been able to acknowledge the fact that it was in the business of processing words and focused upon the positives of change within their organizations, rather than the negatives - and while the nature of the product would no doubt have changed - the organizations themselves may not have needed to go the way of the dinosaurs.
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