SPEAKER 1: I think we're very lucky to have somebody like Professor Cooperrider come teach, because he is one of the most sought-after consultants in the world right now.

SPEAKER 2: What we want to do in at least the first day here is we want to begin to lay the conceptual groundwork for what is appreciative inquiry. How can it help us unlock innovation and creativity and bring people together in ways that other change management processes cannot do? [MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 2: In our management courses, we all teach that strengths perform. But what about this simple, new idea this strengths do more than perform, they transform? So many companies, they think, we'll do a low morale survey to document the low morale in order to create a high engagement and highly energetic and passionate company. And it's just not going to happen. Why? All the studies in the world of low morale will not tell us one thing about what creates the high-engagement, high-commitment work system. What appreciative inquiry is doing and the positive psychology work that's happening and research that's very sound, it's reversing that. It's saying, instead of 80% of our attention on what's wrong, what's broken, on depression, and so on, that leading change is all about strengths. That's all. It has nothing to do with weaknesses.

When I talk with CEOs and executives in every industry today where there's just white-knuckle change, where there's totally unexpected change, change for which most of these institutions and organizations are scarcely prepared and have no roadmap. So I think we're living in a time where it's imperative to have an eye that can appreciate. An eye that can see and surface the true, the good, the better, the possible, everything that brings asset and strength to a system. So one very important part of appreciative inquiry is a set of theories and tools and research all about the elevation, concentration, connection, creating new combinations and chemistries of strengths in a way that builds more positive institutions that bring our highest human strengths to the customer and to the world and so on.

The Drucker School, I think, is a very, very fertile place for this kind of thinking, because Peter Drucker really did feel that management and business and the kind of management that he was talking about, that is probably the most positive force in a society. We can't have a non-totalitarian society, for example, without free and trustworthy institutions that are creating and following up on their word, and creating value. And it's management and managers that do that. I sat down with Peter Drucker, and he wanted to hear about the theory and the practice of appreciative inquiry, and the design of more positive institutions that we were working on. And at the end of the day I said, but Peter, you've written more on management and leadership than anybody in history. Can you put it in a nutshell? What is the essence of management and leadership? And he said, David, that's simple and it's ageless in its essence. He said, the task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths in ways that make a system's weaknesses irrelevant. What an amazing time to be a manager. It's a time where there is this tremendous need for new models and thinking about change.

[MUSIC PLAYING] PROFESSOR JOHN HAYES: Hello, I'm John Hayes. I'm Professor of Management at Leeds University Business School in the UK. I work with Aarhus Business School and have been doing so for several years now. And this morning what I'm going to talk to you about is appreciative inquiry. It's a rather different approach to looking at organizations and trying to change what's happening in organizations. Instead of trying to focus attention on what's wrong and then trying to fix it, this approach looks at what's right and then tries to accentuate it. So it's accentuating the positive rather than eliminating the negative. The world out there is a social construction. We view the world in different ways.

Think of the Middle East crisis, for example. People in Israel or Palestine or elsewhere, they have clear views about what's going on, but they have different views. Similarly, in our organizations, different people have different views about what's happening in those organizations. So we have different constructions of reality. And these constructions of reality are open to change. And appreciative inquiry is actually trying to change the way we view the world. So instead of viewing the world from a deficiency perspective and focusing on what's wrong, we try and view the world more positively, and we try and identify opportunities that can be embraced. Just as plants grow towards the light, so organizations grow and develop towards whatever it is which is the life-giving force in the organization. So rather than focus on problems, we focus on opportunities. We focus on what's going well.

And what appreciative inquiry involves, it involves discovering the best of what is and then, going one step further, and trying to understand why is the best the best. What is it that-- what are the circumstances that are creating these conditions? And then exploring possibilities for amplifying the best. So we try and work out what it is that's working. And then we say, what would the organization be like if this exceptional set of circumstances, if we could actually make that the norm and not the exception? And that's the way that we intervene.

If in your organization you're trying to understand why it is that you've got high labor turnover and people are leaving, rather than seeing it as a problem and focus on why people leave through exit interviews or however else you might investigate that, switch attention to why it is that some people are staying. What is it about their experience at work that turns them on, that creates and develops their commitment to the organization? And then can we amplify that? Can we spread that across the organization? When we look at problems, people get defensive. It's not my fault. It's their fault. People are reluctant to share information. People find it difficult to learn in those circumstances. Alternatively, when we focus attention on what's working well, people get excited. They're prepared to talk about that. They get engaged. This enthusiasm, this excitement, it spreads to others. And we can get a lot of energy behind trying to produce change in organizations. Give it a try sometime. [MUSIC PLAYING]