The Right Way to Nurture Change in Museums
Review Will Phillips and Mary Case

What problems are you having? What's really working well around here? These questions capture the essential difference between traditional change management theory and Appreciative Inquiry. Traditional problem solving considers the organization as if it were made up of mechanical parts. In other words, find out what's broken and fix it. Many leaders realize that museum organizations are built of human beings. Traditional approaches to change management suffer from limitations which fail to account for the human complexity that generates value through knowledge, experience, and relationships.

Appreciate Inquiry focuses on what works well, clarifies conditions of success and then strengthening those conditions. The idea of Appreciative Inquiry flows from a sense that beauty occurs in art everywhere. Art itself is a beautiful idea transformed into concrete form. David Cooperider and his associates at Case Western University developed the idea of Appreciate Inquiry and applied the concept of beauty to the organization. Organizations, they believe are expressions of human beauty and spirit. They view organizations as organic; the whole greater than the parts. You can't take the organization apart and study the pieces, fix them, and plug them back in.

Appreciative Inquiry parallels the approach that Richard Bowles took to planning individual careers in his seminal book, "What Color Is Your Parachute?" Published over 30 years ago and still on the best seller's list because, I believe, because it applies the tools of Appreciative Inquiry to personal change efforts. In the early 70's when I ran regular career planning workshops using this technique, it was not only extraordinarily productive in achieving career change and satisfaction, but the workshops themselves were full of high spirited energy and excitement of individuals focusing on their strengths

The Appreciative Inquiry approach to change management explores what works well and describes the museum's future based on its high moments. Since this process is grounded in real experience, people know how to repeat their successes. Unfortunately, all of us are better at identifying what doesn't work than clarifying what does and nurturing that. We have been trained academically to critique our product and this critique usually attacks what's wrong.

As we focus on strengths, we also build on the seminal research of Marcus Buckingham and Curt Kaufmann published in two books about how to manage people.[1] They found that highly productive organizations also have the highest morale. Their research further identified the managerial style used in these highly productive/high morale organizations. Open-ended interviews revealed that managers used essentially the same basic assumption regardless of the kind of organization. To paraphrase their response to the questions exploring how they managed, great managers said: "First of all, I don't focus on trying to get things out of people that aren't in them. I focus instead on trying to understand what's inside people and then get that out of them. That's hard enough."

Buckingham and Kaufmann discovered that successful management is built on individual strengths, just as Bowles advises regarding successful careers. David Cooperider has clarified and articulated the process of appreciative inquiry for an organization changing and improving by building on its strengths. For our purposes, the best summary of Cooperider's academic work can be found in "The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry," by Sue Annis Hannon. This 60-page book reports the philosophy and gives examples of Appreciative Inquiry.

Hannon's book outlines eight basic assumptions in Appreciative Inquiry. These assumptions nurture the human spirit and anticipate the collegial and professional atmosphere that museums try to achieve.

1. In every society, organization or group, something works

2. What we focus on becomes our reality

3. Reality is created in the moment, and there are multiple realities

4. The act of asking questions or an organization or group influences the group in some way

5. People have more confidence and comfort to journey to the future (the unknown) when they carry forward parts of the past (the known)

6. If we carry parts of the past forward, they should be what is best about the past

7. It is important to value differences

8. The language we use creates our reality

The Appreciative Inquiry process closely relates to the process evident in Future Search Conferences, over five hundred of which have been held around the world. A typical future search conference involves at least fifty people in an eighteen hour, three day conference. Usually, the conference brings together fairly polarized factions around problems that people have been unable to solve successfully. A Future Search Conference discovers the common ground participants share, not their differences. In the six Future Search Conferences which I have conducted, over ninety percent of the issues have been identified as common ground. Once participants realize this, it provides an extraordinary platform on which to build the desired future. Once again, this builds upon strengths. On the other hand, when polarized groups are brought together and more typically focus on the two to ten percent of differences, those differences seem to grow and take on a life of their own.

We've noticed in the few short weeks since September 11, 2001 that individuals don't have the resilience or the will to tackle the many difficult problems facing their organizations. We believe that Appreciative Inquiry, precisely because of its focus on the positive, provides techniques for surrounding the problems, widening the scope, and providing a necessary buoyancy to the hard work of organizational problem solving.

1 "First, Break All The Rules" was their first book. Their second book now is "Now, Discover Your Strengths." Both of these books have simultaneously been on the BusinessWeek's best seller list for an extended time. This dual success is practically unheard of.