Appreciative Inquiry was first conceived in 1986 by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva while they were studying an organization. In this study they interviewed half the organization looking for “problems to be solved” and the other half looking for “miracles to be embraced”. What they discovered was that the information they collected was significantly different in each case.
Appreciative Inquiry Cycle
Late last year I attended a lecture in which Uffe Elbaek, founder and former Principal of the KAOSPilots – International School of New Business Design & Social Innovation, recounted his time with KAOSPilot and gave a talk on his challenging but satisfying role as the CEO of the World Out Games held in Copenhagen.
KAOSPilot’s Intelligent Ecology
Presently I am enjoying a informative workshop headed by Peter Jones of reDESIGNreSEARCH. Once a month a diverse group of us discuss how to best organize and assist people and organizations to make positive change using different methods of dialogue to engage them. Most of the time these discussions are limited to a three hour timeline and we rarely revisit them, but the topic of design and transformational change has recently overflowed into a few extra sessions.
On July 28th I attended a talk given by Dr. Carlos Scolari about the Seven Laws of Interfaces. Carlos is a professor at the University of Vic in Spain. He is a media ecologist and a semiotician; he is a teacher and researcher and also holds a position at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. For the last few months he has been working at sLab as a visiting professor in Toronto.
I recently attended a workshop headed by Peter Jones of reDESIGNreSEARCH whose company focuses on better design through in depth research. He also manages a website Designing with Dialogue which promotes a Toronto-based ‘dialogue community of practice’ which advocates better methods for communication.
Leadership Choices