Appreciative Inquiry
I finally found the philosophy that I want to follow at work: Appreciative Inquiry. It is derived from the term used in the art world, “appreciative eye,” and is a way of moving organizations forward (and I contend that I can use it in my personal life). We normally look at everything through a problem solving method. That is, we look at situations and try to find whats wrong so we can fix it. Appreciative Inquiry is the practice of finding out what has gone well and figuring out how to do more of that. In this way, you naturally do less of the non-productive stuff. I write this because I feel like my organization has done enough (and our new leader, too much) trying to fix whats wrong instead of trying to do more of whats right.
Anyway, I wanted to get this down before I moved on to taking care of other stuff around the house. I’m enthusiastic about trying to push this approach at work. I think we can be more effective if we try it. We certainly can’t do worse for trying something new. The whole culture we’ve got is an experiment anyway. Why not try something else?