APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY

This atricle of mine is published on CONQUEST-the Online Edition, 2009 of Indian Institute of Management-Shillong (IIM-S). This is the link- http://www.iims-conquest.in/

It's also features in NexUs-The SIMS HR Newsletter.

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I take you through a journey into a new concept I learnt recently in my Corporate Psychology class. It was one of those classes where you not just hear, but listen. I absorbed every bit I could, as my professor took us in the realms of stories, fables and tales, only to drive home a point. The point which I present in this paper-the concept of Appreciative Inquiry (AI).

AI is a way of life. It is a thought process which should come natural to all human beings. But for Satan. Developed in the 1980’s by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, its extent is not limited to the organization it is adapted in. In fact, its essence lies in the energy that gives life to a system. It may be the optimism of innocence a child is blessed of, the aggressiveness and lose temperament of a sales guy or the rigid timings of an office.

AI finds its roots in the concepts of Organization Development (OD), an area, most mature organizations have focused on and the relatively new ones are embracing it with keenness. When an OD consultant is called for help, he mechanically looks for problems. And if you go looking for something you are bound to find it. So you have problems glaring right into your face and appear bigger than they were before you have arrived. Thus the problem is to go hunting for problem itself. The better choice is to ask the right question, as to –“what works well here?” This is the first assumption AI settles itself on. What works right for an organization, for an individual, is the entry point of the intervention. How wonderful is it to seek the best first, than focusing on the miser negativities? The role of the OD consultant then becomes that of a facilitator who looks for clues to what made excellence possible and the conditioning to replicate it. So he seeks solutions that already exist, magnify what works, and works well for the organization and focus on life and not decay.

AI has the propensity to engage the entire organization, deriving its focus from the OD interventions which work in a similar fashion engaging everybody from the lowest link to the top notch hook. The inquiry discovers data that is then used to envision the future based on the analysis of the rich positive past. What we focus on becomes our reality. And this second assumption precisely sets the stage-this time on fire. The fire which will lead the individuals to perform with a sense of urgency-because now what they see is success and not barriers. This shares ground with the positivity which was the basis and is the guide channelizing and carving out new routes to possibilities of success.

In doing so, the lessons learnt on conflict management, values, assumptions and beliefs, the nerve to value other’s belief should be held close to oneself, because in the process of leading change it is imperative to value differences. Innovating what will be-the delivery part of the plan comes next. No doubt creativity is born in chaos but AI aims at a systematic quest of a discovery of strengths and assets of an organization. It works like a highlighter pen-making the strengths more visible than anything else-right opposite to the Dilbert method of highlighting the counterproductive workplace elements.

The magical thing about AI is its scope. It begins with an individual, encompasses the organization and stretches its abode to accommodate the society at large, serving with the same basic four ‘D’ cycle of-Discover, Dream, Design and Delivery, as I mentioned above. Also its application can be seen in variant fields of healthcare, education, community services, corporate and government organizations. It’s this beauty of AI that caught not only my attention but interest too. If I were to be a part of an organization which encourages its stakeholders to be enthusiastic change agents, the basics of AI would help me derive a model suitable to the situation. After all life is what you make of it. Let’s make it positive.

-Simar

HR Batch 2008-2010
Symbiosis Institute Of Management Studies
PUNE

CRYING!

The world seems doesn’t to care,
But I hear you somewhere-crying in thin air.
Lost you seem to eternity
Strangeness engulfs the very realms wherein you scream.
Notice if you must;
That you are not alone.
Take a look around
Millions sore throats you’ll stare-
The green’s gone
The green as it used to be;
The blue is no more blue,
But white and muddy and oh mucky some more;
The sky’s not anymore painted
It’s the black that shadows it whole.
I know why you cry
The colors are not your only concern,
It’s the source behind the hues that’s taking your soul.
Man is but an instrument of change
For change it must, in waste or in gain.
This is how it’s meant to be
Or this is how’s it’s made at least.
Don’t ask me why, my friend
I’ am only there till my time ends.
But till am in here, sharing every inch of your space
I promise I’ll be there for you,
For I owe the life I breath to you.
Don’t you worry,
Don’t be in despair;
For after every rise
There’s a dip, in there.
Sure it must harm some
But others it must repair.
You are the essence of us being here
Please survive for no one cares
Inhuman we are, but you be what you ought to be
Help this stupid, insane friend of yours
And I’m sure everything’s gonna be good again!

-Dedicated to our Mother Earth , the Space that surrounds it and beyond.

-Simar

LOST AND FOUND!

Something within, urges me to write today. Something that I can’t interpret for once because it is a churn of feelings, leaving me satisfied with every passing moment. It’s becoming difficult for me to bring out that contentment in my words, all the more the reason for a contradiction between my feeling and my urge to display the same in my writings somehow.

I have an exam tomorrow. Had one this morning too. And shall continue to sit for these damn sessions my whole life it seems! There is however no trace of urgency to study for the damn thingi for tomorrow. It is but a subject sitting there, eating up a date on a calendar by listing in the schedule and wasting the valuable hours of my life having to mug up things that were simple enough to form only one chapter of another subject.

So, instead of resting my eminent hours on this pseudo subject I wish to revive my work-my Blog. This is something I’ am made for, and which is made for me in turn-Writing. As I have always been. Started sometime in my ninth or 10th standard, I discovered(to my self-for the ease of critics! ) this concept called a B L O G. I still remember vividly, describing my discovery to some of my close friends then, describing in all wisdom my great utilization of the time I sat in front of the new technology called-The Internet. So BLOGGING was a concept I chanced upon, and that was the time the word was not known to be what it is today. This decade has seen, unlike the one that preceded it, a new version of blogging-extending widely in its reach and scope. The new variant of font, size, colour, templates and grandeur that exits now was not the thing of the past. There sure were some efforts at creating a user friendly space for the viewer, but that was it. Scripting was tough for non- engineers. Pictures took ages to upload and hence making the entire process very time consuming. Here, I must confess, that amidst these difficulties I started blogging for I knew that this was the future of free sharing of experiences and opinions, to a larger audience.

While I pursued my interest I was also active on a lot of forums, and I’am a proud owner of two publications (my poems) in a forums (The name of which skips me!!) first Online E-Book called-‘Celebrating Creativity’. My poems featured along with some great works of people from all across the globe-mostly Indians, settled across cultures, ethnicities and geographies. What a feeling it was when I first saw the online version of the e-Book and impulsively called up my best friend to share my happiness, there after running to my Dadi and hugging her, followed by dragging her by the arm to the study to have a look at my achievement. What a marvel! OHk…In case you are wondering at my humbleness, I was extremely happy then, and every time I think of it-I leave a happier person!

That followed long long long hours of sitting glued up to the net, searching online poetry competitions, online magazines and the like, until to my huge disappointment finding none which were free of costs. All required some sort of PayPal facility, something I was not eligible for then. This, entwined with the heavy load of my Engineering subjects led me to fade away from one of the most cherished words of my then literary side-blog. Gradually as my grades sore high and I gained interest in my IT subjects, I was left with no time to sit and write something substantial for the world to read. I did not, however leave writing completely. For it was and is the very essence of ME being ME! Then followed a series of events with my PC crashing twice in a row, exams which never seemed to end, emotions a laggard adolescent is supposed to live with, FRIENDZ and the commencement of my MBA preparation all spread through period of about a year and two left me tired and exhausted and interested in a lot of other new things that my conscious mind forgot all about me blogging, including my user ID and password!! For as they say that all good things come to an end- for me the end was not to come so soon. There were and are good things remaining-says my heart and soul. So, as I joined SIMS, and saw the world blogging to glory, a sense of shame engulfed me as to why-why on this Earth did I ever cede to blog??!! Also it reiterated my self-belief which was constructed when I was still in school that BLOG’s are the future of knowledge sharing. This feeling of my envisioning a thing which would happen and had happened in the future did somehow reduce the propensity of shame and instead moved me to revive my LOST AND FOUND BLOG. My deep felt gratitude to GOOGLE, which has come up with such a beautiful integration of all structures and processes via technology driven innovation, that I found a way to my old blog again. Also, at this ‘thank you’ moment I wish to thank all those people who egged on for me to revive my blog. They all know who they are and I thank them from the core of my writing heart!

Right then, this post, marks the new life of my-Keep Life Simple!

Leaving a glad ME :)
Simar