Appreciative Intelligence: Seeing the Mighty Oak in the Acorn - Hardcover

Thatchenkery, Tojo Joseph; Metzker, Carol

 
9781576753538: Appreciative Intelligence: Seeing the Mighty Oak in the Acorn
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1576753530 ISBN 13: 9781576753538
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

“Provocative . . . reveals the ability behind exciting and unexpected innovations, turnarounds, or accomplishments that were once considered impossible.” —W. Warner Burke, Edward L. Thorndike Professor of Psychology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
 
Appreciative Intelligence provides a new answer to what enables successful people to dream up their extraordinary and innovative ideas; why employees, partners, colleagues, investors, and other stakeholders join them on the path to their goals, and how they achieve these goals despite obstacles and challenges. It is not simple optimism. People with appreciative intelligence are realistic and action oriented—they have the ability not just to identify positive potential, but to devise a course of action to take advantage of it.
 
Drawing on their own original research and recent discoveries in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, Thatchenkery and Metzker outline the evidence for appreciative intelligence, detail its specific characteristics, and show how you can develop this skill and use it in your own life and work. They show how the most successful leaders are able to spread appreciative intelligence throughout an organization, and they offer tools and exercises you can use to increase your own level of appreciative intelligence and so become more creative, resilient, successful, and personally fulfilled.
 
“An inspiring and practical account of how to develop the capacity to see potential within the present and to develop this capacity within oneself and in others.” —Jane E. Dutton, William Russell Kelly Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Psychology, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan
 
“A compelling justification for . . . what endows successful leaders with the qualities of persistence, conviction, comfort with uncertainty, and resilience to overcome challenges.” —Dr. V. Nilakant, coauthor of Change Management

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tojo Thatchenkery, PhD, is a professor of organizational learning at the School of Public Policy, George Mason University. He is the author of several books and articles on change management and has consulted with many international organizations, including IBM, Lucent Technologies, the American Red Cross, British Petroleum, and the International Monetary Fund.
Carol Metzker has a master's degree in organizational learning from George Mason University and has more than fifteen years’ experience in communications and corporate environments.

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Appreciative Intelligence: The Missing Link

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

—William Blake (1790)


When the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990, the general public, as well as scientists in the aerospace field, held high hopes. The world waited expectantly for discoveries and answers to riddles of the universe that would be revealed by the telescope’s views of space.

But blurry images caused by a flawed mirror sent those hopes crashing down to earth. Congress demanded an explanation for the failure. The project and its creators became the butt of late-night television jokes. Stress was high among NASA engineers, as were health problems.

“It was traumatic,” said Charlie Pellerin, the former director of NASA’s astrophysics division, who oversaw the launch of the Hubble. Nobody could see how to fix the problem, which many seemed afraid even to address.

Well, nobody except Pellerin. He not only had the initial insight to solve the problem but also found the funding and the resources to repair the telescope, for which he received NASA’s Outstanding Leadership Medal. The ultimate reward was that over the next decade, the telescope provided spectacular images and important discoveries of stars, galaxies, and other cosmic phenomena.

2
What was behind Pellerin’s success? There were dozens of other people at NASA with high IQ and world-class technical knowledge—they were, after all, rocket scientists. They could perform the same analysis, use the same logic, and wield the same models and mathematical formulas. So what gave Pellerin the insight to help the telescope get a metaphorical pair of eyeglasses? What made him persist until the telescope was fixed when others felt overwhelmed by the challenge?

Pellerin possessed something more than the others did: Appreciative Intelligence. While he lived with the same conditions and circumstances as everyone else, his mind perceived reality very differently than others did. He reframed the situation as a project that was not yet finished, not as a completed product that had failed. He saw the potential for a positive future situation—a working space telescope. He saw how that positive future could happen as the result of technical solutions—a corrective optics package and repairs performed by a crew of astronauts1—that were already possible with a rearrangement of funding and resources that already existed within NASA. By reframing, recognizing the positive, or what worked, and envisioning the repaired telescope, he was able to help orchestrate the unfolding of a series of events that changed the future.

Consider another story. In 1979, after participating in a project to immunize children in the Philippines against polio and reading about the worldwide eradication of smallpox, Clem Renouf, then president of the civic organization Rotary International, telephoned John Sever, then chief of the Infectious Diseases Branch at the National Institutes of Health and a fellow Rotarian. Renouf asked Sever to find out whether Rotary could help eradicate a disease. A month later, Sever recommended pursuing polio eradication.

For the next two decades, a group of key stakeholders, backed by a million Rotarians, overcame challenge after challenge to battle the disease. They reassured the medical community that focusing on polio wouldn’t take away from the battle against other diseases such as measles, tuberculosis, or HIV/AIDS. Rotarians raised millions of dollars to buy polio vaccine. They persuaded reluctant government health ministries in many countries to help the cause and invited the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the U.S. Center for Disease Control to join Rotary as its 3program partners. They motivated volunteers who transported vaccine in developing countries where there were few roads and who found ways to keep the vaccine vials cold where there was no electricity. Rotary provided infrastructure, organization, and helping hands worldwide to deliver and administer the oral polio vaccine to millions of children, many whose parents were impoverished, illiterate, and afraid that the vaccine was voodoo or a disguised attempt by culturally or politically different organizations to sterilize or harm their children. With the audacious goal of eradicating the virus, the program raised awareness of immunization and disease prevention for illnesses beyond polio. It spurred the allocation of government funds for vaccines in certain countries and improved disease surveillance processes. At the same time the program was changing the world’s response to disease, it reduced the incidence of polio by 99%, from over 350,000 cases in 125 countries in 1988 to 1,255 cases in 2004.2

What was behind the string of creative and innovative solutions behind the polio eradication project? What differentiated this project from the medical community’s attempts to eradicate other diseases such as malaria and yellow fever? What was behind more than 20 years of persistence? If the same vaccine, medical knowledge and expertise, challenges, and conditions existed for others who looked at the situation, what ability made the difference for this group of Rotarians—a volunteer group of predominantly business and community leaders—to face polio and reduce its incidence by 99%?

The opening for a different outcome was created when Rotarians reframed the challenge of eradicating polio. Renouf, Sever, Herb Pigman, and Carlos Canseco, with the help of Dr. Albert Sabin, who had developed the oral polio vaccine, reframed polio as an organizational challenge instead of a medical problem. They focused on Rotarians’ organizational skills, leadership, talents, and resources as the key to the solution. They saw a positive future—a world without polio—and envisioned a string of managerial decisions and organizational operations—transportation, refrigeration, finances, communication, and education provided by Rotary’s established worldwide network of volunteers—that were already possible at that time.

What did Charlie Pellerin and the leaders of Rotary have in common that led to their projects’ success? What is the ability that enables 4some people to take new or challenging circumstances and turn them into golden opportunities and enriching experiences for themselves and those around them, while others falter at similar situations? It is Appreciative Intelligence, the ability to perceive the positive inherent generative potential within the present. Put in a simple and metaphorical way, Appreciative Intelligence is the ability to see the mighty oak in the acorn. It is the ability to reframe a given situation, to appreciate its positive aspects, and to see how the future unfolds from the generative aspects of the current situation.

Appreciative Intelligence: Seeing the Mighty Oak in the Acorn offers a new perspective on successful people and provides a road map for those who want to realize their full potential. It offers an explanation of a unique ability of those who formally or informally lead projects and people and who make a difference in their small groups, organizations, the larger community, and the world. It provides a new answer to what enables successful people to dream up their extraordinary and innovative ideas; why employees, students, partners, colleagues, investors, and other stakeholders join them on the path to their end goals; and how they achieve those goals despite obstacles and challenges. It shows how a new type of intelligence, not traditional IQ or other types, links to success. In the next ten chapters, this book introduces Appreciative Intelligence, a new construct that explains a competitive advantage possessed by exceptional leaders in business,...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1576753530
ISBN 13 
9781576753538
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Berrett-Koehler
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