Learning Intention: Engage with others to discover their experiences and their hopes for the way forward
Engaging others is central to this kind of leadership/changemaking. It creates the space for everyone to take responsibility for the success of the organisation as a whole, not just for their own jobs or work area.
This contrasts with traditional approaches to leadership, which have focused on developing individual capability while neglecting the need for developing collective capability or embedding the development of leaders within the context of the organisation they are working in.
This leadership culture is characterised by everyone focussing on continual learning and, through this, on the improvement of the service provided to customers. This requires high levels of dialogue, debate and discussion to achieve shared understanding about quality problems and solutions.
Leaders need to ensure that people adopt a leadership mentality in their roles and take individual and collective responsibility in delivering for team members and people who use services. Achieving this requires proactive and intentional engagement, careful planning, persistent commitment, and a constant focus on distributed leadership and culture.
Appreciative Inquiry
Please work your way through this section, making notes and reflecting
Learning Intention: Conduct a Mini Appreciative Inquiry, involving at least four others and learning from the process
At its heart, AI is about the search for the best in people, their organisations, and the strengths-filled, opportunity-rich world around them.
AI is not so much a shift in the methods and models of organisational change, but is a fundamental shift in the overall perspective taken throughout the entire change process to ‘see’ the wholeness of the human system and to ‘inquire’ into that system’s strengths, possibilities, and successes.
Introductory Video
Useful for
- Framing large scale conversations
- Identifying what people care about
- Connecting to the positive
- Involving diverse stakeholders
Resource: Appreciative Inquiry
Mini- Appreciative Inquiry (AI)
Having watched the introductory video the task now is to plan how you will each conduct a mini-appreciative inquiry involving at least four others.
The AI will invite stories, observations and ideas about the future of OT leadership. You will be provided with questions, recording documents, and support.
This mini AI applies all of the skills you have learned so far and begins to inform how you will create your personal ‘virtual quilt square’ for the final day of the programme.
The image below overviews the process.
In both the Discovery and Dreaming part of the Appreciative Inquiry you will be asking Powerful Questions as you undertake a series of Empathy Journeys with others.
The next two sections of the toolbox will take you through this in detail to enable you to have an understanding on which to conduct the practical activity later. Please work your way through this and speak with you Thinking Partner to confirm your understanding.
Powerful Questions
We know that questions are more transformative than answers and are essential tools of engagement. Questions create the space for something new to emerge. However, in the busy world of task, target, fix it and sort it, answers are still valued more than questions and in the short-term often feel easier.
Answers, especially those that respond to our need for quick results, while satisfying, shut down the discussion and the future shuts down with them.
What can make us impatient with questions and hungry for answers is that in organisational life there is confusion between the process of exploring a question and ‘talking shop’. The latter has no meaning and leads to an ego-based argument, analysis, explanation and defensive behaviour. The former creates space for new thinking to emerge.
Useful for
- Preparing for conversations that you want to be different
- Identifying the ‘heart’ of what you want to inquire about
- Defining patterns of questions for events, conversations with teams or one-to-ones
Resources: Powerful Questions
Empathy Journeys
Empathy journeys are conducted to enable us as leaders and change-makers to really understand the thoughts, feelings and experiences of others. This is strongly linked to the development of excellent powerful questions and the work around levels of listening and rules of engagement.
Empathy journeys find out what is going on for people in the system, they get underneath titles and dismantle assumption through genuine inquiry and listening. These empathy journeys can take many formats from a one-to-one conversation to intensive shadowing, to graphic recording and films.
Whatever the methodology, the purpose remains the same to discover what you can’t see and feel.
Useful for
- Engagement with people who use systems or services that you are trying to change/improve/innovate
- Working with teams to understand the diversity of thinking and feeling that may not be visible
- Gathering themes and insights, illuminating blind spots, and dismantling assumptions
Resource: Deeper purpose conversations
Detailed Guidance for your Mini Appreciative Inquiry
Resource: Detailed Guidance for Appreciative Inquiry