[MUSIC] When we start the social innovation journey, we all have a tendency to focus mostly on problems, on what's not there, on what we need. And as we looked at last week, this can actually give us lots of insight. At the same time, I want to talk right now about why focusing not on what we don't have but what we do have may in fact be even more generative and more creative for helping us to address the social issues that we want to address. One of the interesting insights into this came from the practice of psychology. In the early 1990s, a man called Martin Seligman, who was then the president of the American Psychological Association, began talking to colleagues about this question. Why in the history of psychology and psychological research, which by then was about 100 years, have we spent most of our time focusing and studying pathology, ie., what's wrong with us? Depression, anxiety, psychosis. This is great, he wasn't arguing we shouldn't of studied that or that we should stop, we made a lot of progress in those areas in new treatments, new therapies, drugs, etc., came out from that. His question was, though, why is that all that we're studying and what would happen if we started looking at positive outliers, ie., unusually happy people, unusually creative people, unusually resilient people? What's going on with them? How does that work? What are their characteristics? Are there things we can do to help all of us become happier, more creative, more resilient? And so, Seligman started going around and giving speeches at conferences, and talking about this idea of positive psychology. And he got quite a response, and said, actually, he used to sometimes go in the back and people would come up to him after he talked. And we're quite emotional about this idea and very inspired, sometimes even crying, saying, I never imagined I could even study or think about those things and I would really love to do that. So, quite a number of people began studying positive psychology, and now, 20 years later, into that, we found out quite a few interesting things. One of the central findings has been that unusually happy people tend to spend more time than most of us focusing on their own strengths and trying to develop those strengths, rather than focusing on what's wrong with them, their weakness, what they're not good at, the things that many of us obsess about. And it turns out that not only in kind of individuals but in social systems like organizations, this also seems to be true. Another man called David Cooperrider, who is an organizational scholar and researcher, was discovering much the same thing during that same period of time. He was asking, why when we look at organizations are we trying to fix them constantly, as if they're machines, as if they're broken machines. And couldn't we also be looking at them as something alive, and if we did that, wouldn't we want to know what's best about this organization, what's most alive about it, what are its greatest potentials, and can we grow those. So he developed, along with a number of colleagues, the practice of appreciative inquiry, and this has proved to be I think one of the great revolutions in organizational thinking and in organizational design. One of my favorite examples to illustrate how this can work is the case of Avon, Mexico, which is, the company, Avon, many of you may know about, it's a cosmetics company, very well known, been quite established for many years in the 70's and 80's. The Avon lady, because it was a lady, always at that point. A woman who would go door-to-door, or a salesperson, selling the cosmetics in the home, became the symbol of that company. And in the 90s, Avon's division in Mexico, Avon, Mexico, was doing fine like the rest of the company, but was really struggling with relationships between genders, between men and women. And they were having lots of sexual harassment complaints. There were kind of a glass ceiling firmly in place, so many of the salespeople and administrative workforce were women, but very few senior managers were women. As as the farther you went up, the fewer women you would see. And Avon was trying to do everything they could about this. They were bringing in consultants to do training, sensitivity, to write rules and policies, carrot sticks, to try to deal with this. And they were becoming increasingly frustrated because whatever they did, they couldn't seem to shake this problem. So finally, they started consulting with a team of people that included Marge Schiller, who wrote about this later, and David Cooperrider, among others. And said, can you help us with this? So, they brought the appreciative inquiry process to bear on this problem, and said, first of all, tell us what is it that you want. And the people at Avon said, well, we want to stop all of this sexual harassment, and we want to stop all this discrimination against women. They said, no, no, that's what you don't want. What do you want? Well, we'd actually like to be a company, a place where relationships across genders were really great, you know? They were very fruitful, and we enjoyed them, and they were fulfilling, and that people of both genders thrived in this company. They said, okay. We can work with that. So, again, rather than starting and saying, okay, what's broken here? What's not working? Where don't you have this? because that was pretty obvious. The team said, let's actually find out where you do have this. Because even in a system that seems quite broken, there are always moments, strengths, potentials there, where what you want exists at some level. So, they started this large participatory interview process, where people began asking each other, the employees in the company interviewing each other, about when they had a really great interaction at the company with a member of the opposite sex. So, the first part of this, people would get in pairs, a man and a woman. And I'm the man, I would interview the woman, tell me about a time when you had a really great interaction, relationship, project, with a man here at the company. And I would dig into that story and we'd write it down and we'd capture it, and then we'd flip and she would ask me about that. So all these pairs began to interview each other and all these stories started to be collected and looked at together, again, quite participatory, not just the team. And over time, the company began shifting, even from that inquiry, by hearing all these stories of moments when gender relationships were really good. At the same time, they were able to then translate that into both visions and dreams of the future and to concrete policies. And this was so effective that very shortly thereafter, within about six months, that the first woman was appointed to the Executive Committee, profits were going up, and a little after that, Avon Mexico actually won that catalyst award, as one of the best places for women to work in Mexico. So that is a glimpse of what I think is a transformative power of shifting from just looking at needs, gaps, what's wrong, to looking at strengths, resources, what's right. So, in the next section, we're going to take a look at that approach, and think about it, in terms of social innovation. How can we bring in an appreciative strengths based approach into our social change work? And when we do, what kinds of things tend to happen? [MUSIC]
