Our Philosophy
From the current paradigm...
Based on our own and fellow practitioners' extensive experience with implementing
change in organisations, we have come to know that:
- Our world, business environment, and human organisations have become too
dynamic and complex for one or a few experts to fully understand.
- Using a few experts to design a strategy / solution and then selling it to
the rest of the organisation is becoming increasingly ineffective and
inefficient.
- Although solving problems and improving performance using critical
analysis, gap identification, and solution design did not fail us, they can
only deliver incremental improvements to the status quo at best.
- Some of the unintended side effects of focusing on what is wrong with our
organisations are change fatigue, vocabularies of human deficit,
defensiveness, weakened relationships and teamwork, and negative identify
and culture.
...to the new paradigm.
Our approach to change is informed by the best of the classical approaches and
recent innovations, most notably Integrated Strategic Change and Appreciative
Inquiry. We believe that:
- In every individual, every group, and every organisation, there are
assets, strengths, virtues, hopes, and dreams.
- The best way to achieve excellence is to discover, leverage, and align our
individual and collective assets, strengths, virtues, hopes, and dreams.
- External and internal alignment at the individual, group, and organisation
levels are pre-requisites for high performance.
- The most powerful way to achieve external and internal alignment at all
levels is to engage all stakeholders in meaningful dialogs and conversations
about their most desired future based on the best of the past and their
highest ideals.
- When there is a shared understanding and image of the kind of organisation
and world that we want to create, change can happen at the speed of the
imagination.
Some of the intended side effects of focusing on what is working well and
what are the possibilities include energy, excitement, confidence, optimism,
creativity, innovation, strengthened relationships and teamwork, and positive
identity and culture.
For additional information
What is Appreciative Inquiry ?
What is Integrated Strategic Change ?
"We
have reached the end of problem solving as a mode of inquiry capable of
inspiring, mobilizing, and sustaining human system change.
The future of
Organization Development belongs to methods that affirm, compel, and accelerate
anticipatory learning involving larger and larger levels of collectivity."
---David Cooperrider
"Our first response to overcome problems is part of the very mindset
that generated them. Fragmentaion, competition, and reactiveness are not
problems to be solved; rather they are frozon patterns to be disolved.
The solvent we propose is a new way of thinking, feeling, and being; a
culture of systems. Fragmentary thinking becomes systemic when we recover 'the
memory of the whole,' the awareness that wholes actually precede parts."
--- Peter Senge, Otto Sharmer, etc.