Appreciative Inquiry

You can get some good practical stuff off the practitioner sites on line, like this pdf file about appreciative inquiry from the Asian Development Bank knowledge solutions page here.

I'd thought of appreciative inquiry as like action research, and not something I was doing, but according to this paper I am because appreciative inquiry "studies the positive attributes of organizations" and that's what I'm studying - exemplar case studies of organisations where their projects or programmes were perceived as successfully completed. I like the idea of learning from what succeeds instead of from failure (so depressing that you want to hide away and forget it). I had access to my case studies because the participants were so pleased and proud of what they'd done that they wanted to be appreciated. Isn't that what appreciative inquiry is about?

I don't know, so I guess I'll have to check the academic literature too.

Restructuring

Supervisors advise me to restructure my case studies, which I understand because I can't have five chapters, one for each case study, at 8,000-10,000 - it doesn't fit in with a balanced thesis. To structure it I should write round the framework I have built from the literature and the case studies and answer four questions:

1. Which conditions were important for producing qualities of engagement
2. What else made it possible for people to produce these qualities?
3. Which qualities of engagement emerged over time?
4. What kind of value resulted and how?

I should answer the first and third questions together because they address the components of engagement, what preconditions or steering factors were there initially and what emerged. The second and third questions address how these components/conditions/factors connected.

That's the idea. I'm just not quite sure what I'm doing.

Coaching

The OUBS has been recruiting tutors for its new MBA foundation course, and requires tutors that not only have business knowledge but also recent experience of coaching managers, so the coaching industry is growing, growing so rapidly that Henley now offers an MSc in coaching and behavioural change. It's an MSc course that includes a module on neuro linguistic programming.

Whilst on an NLP course recently, I've met, worked and conversed with people who are following this coaching MSc. They tell me there are all sorts of coaches including life coaches, leadership coaches, executive coaches and even gestalt coaches. Because of the coach's need to know the limits of his/her abilities, the Henley students have to write assignments on differences between coaching, counselling and therapy and I don't know how well they have to assess their alliances with their coachees and how effective the coachee consequently becomes. How do you assess the effectiveness of coaching?

On last week's (8th July) The Bottom Line, discussed working with people you don't like. One of the guests, John Atkin, chief operating officer of Syngenta, denied ever working with people he didn't like, and another suggested using coaches for senior workers to do 360 evaluations - a long process to tell the boss "actually you're not behaving very nicely". But will coaching always produce the outcome you want?

Coachees' self-efficacy is the topic of a paper to be presented at the up-coming Academy of Management conference. The presenters (Baron, Morin & Morin) find that coachees who worked with a coach who overestimated the working alliance, experienced less growth in self-efficacy than coachees who work with a coach who either accurately estimated or underestimated the working alliance. It seems to me that finding suggests

• coaches have moral and ethical responsibility for their behaviour
• organisations that use coaches must be aware of the conditions under which coaching works

Progress

Supervisors now have all five rewritten case studies and we meet next Monday. That's a lot to read, even though they have the same ten sections five times:

1. Background
2. Programme description
3. Interviewees
4. Key parties
5. Programme outcome
6. Case discussion
7. Review of case
8. Value from engagement
9. Appendix
10. References

Figures include:

• key parties
  
• participants
  
• governance structure sometimes
• states of engagement
• template for engagement that I developed from the literature
• framework against the template for each case

Tables include lists of interviewees, sources and of actions people took to engage (NAO, 2006). The cases should be comparable and the writing should take the reader through description to analysis and findings.

---

NAO. 2006. Central government's use of consultants: Building client and consultant commitment. In National Audit Office (Ed.), Vol. I: HMSO #109

Weekend writing

I haven't posted for a week, but I've been writing. I've rewritten all my case studies, and three of them I've sent to supervisors. Who've cancelled next Wednesday's supervision meeting. :(
So I'll have time to send them the last two before the rearranged meeting. :)

Rewriting each case study takes a long morning, with the computer off, a pencil in hand, scribbling over the last printed copy. Sometimes, when working at home I can stare down the garden, if the hop plant isn't dribbling over my window blocking the view.

I find as I write that some words leave me wondering, as if they're not quite right, not quite saying what I want them to say. Focusing on those niggles helps sort them out. Perhaps rewording or reordering helps, or finding a reference to support a point. In one case study, my interviewees knew their management theory and talked about it, so I'm looking up the relevant literature, and the less obviously relevant literature to turn the argument the way I want it. Looking up literature takes time, and means switching my computer back on. I try to delay that because the computer distracts me to email, or here blogging, so my time is less productive. The productive time leads to more than just rewriting, but to analysis too.

To check literature, I search my Endnote database to see I've already read and what notes I've added and occasionally I search this blog to find where I'd remarked on some literature or commented on analysis a year ago or more. I surprise myself that I'd thought that and find the blog more useful than I'd realised.

Now, no more blogging. Rewrite.

Cool opportunities

My fellow blogger, Minh, gave me some useful feedback on the blog I wrote for The Bottom Line last week, and asked,

How do you end up getting these cool publication opportunities?

I guess I'm lucky to be in the right place at the right time, and you make your own luck to be there by talking to the right people. I'd been on a media training course that I'd found out about through a routine circular email that went round the OU Business School. Later I'd discussed the experience with Les Budd, who usually does The Bottom Line blogs, and it went on from there.

They are cool opportunities, aren't they? Visiting the BBC, and watching a programme being recorded, listening to the experiences of people who do business is more interesting than getting some erudite paper into a learned journal that no-one reads, but that looks good on your CV, and gets you academic jobs because it'll improve the university research ratings.

Unfortunately, I haven't published anything erudite and learned and I don't know what sort of job I'll be doing when I finish my dissertation.

OU teaching awards

I've just attended the Open University Teaching Awards ceremony, where they award the nominated best tutors (associate lecturers) and others of this year. Its atmosphere is as good as at a degree ceremony, but more intimate as there were only around a score of awards. We have around 8000 tutors.

The vice chancellor, Martin Bean, was cheerfully presenting the awards, announced by Josie Taylor, professor of learning technologies. He always looks round to see who's in the audience, and welcomed one of the deans, Chris Earl, from the maths, computing and technology faculty, but our OUBS dean wasn't there. I think the VC is trying to encourage the deans to attend such events.

One incident amused us. Two FELS tutors came on the stage. Now FELS is the faculty that deals with foreign languages, so you can understand that it would have tutors in Europe, and that languages are taught using Elluminate and other e-learning technologies. One of these tutors took the opportunity to speak to the audience, explaining that this was the first time she'd met her colleagues face-to-face, despite working together since 2004, and could someone in the higher echelons please arrange for the ALs to get together more often.

Higher echelons! She's standing right next to the top echelon of the university ladder.

Martin Bean looked right, left, up, down and behind the curtain. (See him on Berrill Stadium if you're internal staff). At this point, Josie Taylor gently ushered the tutor off the stage, commenting,

"If you don't ask, you don't get!"

Yet, a few moments later, another tutor arrives on stage for her award, and also announces she wants to say something. She's a science tutor, and explains that in her faculty the ALs do get to meet, in fact had met only a couple of weeks ago, and that the FELS ALS need to ask for such a meeting and Martin Bean takes this chance to add,

"Ask your dean."