To find out more about ODN Europe go to http://www.odneurope.org/
In its second year, the ODN Europe conference hit another high, hosting 20 breakout sessions and 16 posters over two days. Three highlights for me: one that I wholeheartedly agreed, one which helped me bring out a different view, and a final note on how things get done.
The whole-hearted agreement:
Hendrika Santer Bream and Paul Mulligan, Change Managers at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, gave a great talk about their application of Appreciative Inquiry in change situations. If you reframe questions from negative to positive it enables staff and managers to approach change discussions much more positively. For example, when working with senior nurses, they moved the question from ‘How do we reduce absence?’ to ‘How can we give ourselves the greatest chance to make a difference?’ At the conference, their exercise on Appreciative Inquiry was genuinely moving. It was impressive to see seasoned organisational development experts engage with, learn from and get benefit from a self-discovery exercise inside a 90 minute session.*
A difference of view:
What would you add to the list?
Ralph Stacey used Chaos theory to suggest that people creating organisations should not expect to define a ‘right answer’. Rather they should expect constant evolution, as diversity at the lowest level has unplanned consequences for the larger system. When people make strategic long-term plans, this is more about addressing people’s needs for comfort, than planning the future. Listening to Ralph, I thought the insights from Chaos theory are interesting, but I struggled with the idea that human organisations, like long-term weather systems, are fundamentally unplannable.** My instinct would be that plans are needed, at least to understand how far you are off course…
How these things get done:
Through determination and good will. The Chair of the ODN Europe, Kate Cowie, led the event for the second year. There is real warmth in the room for all she has done. It’s worth nothing that Kate has been paid back some of the loans she made to ODN Europe to get it off the ground but not all yet. ODN Europe is now in operating profit so Kate should be fully paid back by 2015. That’s commitment to the cause. Thank you Kate.
* Details of the Appreciative Inquiry exercise: 4 minutes each with a partner to talk about each of the first three steps: Discovery – of a time when you’d worked well; Dream – of a time when that could be even better 6 months from now; Design – specifying what the future would be like. These were followed by Destiny (I thought of it as Deliver) where you had just 1 minute to specify the one most important thing to sort out. It worked for me. I liked the foundations in Positive Psychology and Flow. I liked that the result would be not only agreement on actions but also more probability of actually carrying them out.
**An example to explain the difference with Ralph’s view? We worked with a mining company that had committed to opening a major new mine in a small developing company. It had to open in 2017; it had committed to employing 85% local staff, at all levels. Yet, when the HR department started to put the plan together, it found that in some job types, (e.g. project managers)) there were not enough people in the country to meet the need. It’s an extreme example, but it’s a real one. Planning is absolutely necessary in this situation, and it needs to be rational, driven by volumes, productivity, skills and analytics. Your resource plan should extend out at least as far as your strategic plan. I liked Ralph’s insights, but this example made me think there was still a value in planning!