Introduction: Expanding Organizational Practices: Lessons from Therapeutic Conversations
  

by Sheila McNamee and Harlene Anderson

This issue of the AI Practitioner features a range of collaborative practices originating in the field of therapy but which are gaining broad-scale use within organizations. These practices share with Appreciative Inquiry a focus on our actions and conversations with others.

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This article focuses on dialogue as an important aspect of Appreciative Inquiry: learning to understand. The author sets out the importance of listening, hearing and speaking in dialogue with others as well as having the silent or inner dialogue with ourselves or an imagined other. Interacting through dialogue invites participation, a sense of belonging and ownership.

What does it mean to be Appreciative?

by Eero Riikonen and Sara Vataja

This article focuses on the nature of respect and appreciation by referring to ideas proposed by a number of European philosophers and authors, including Baudrillard, Bataille, De Certeau, Kafka and Heidegger. It also discusses the implications of these views for client work, using the experiences of a Finnish expert cooperative, the CoopHope, as a starting point. The key argument is that, to enhance appreciation and respectfulness, it is useful to focus more on style than on content of interaction, and to base client work and consultation activities on different metaphors, primarily those relating to various forms of art and writing.

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Promoting Social Networks in the Healthcare System in
Ribeirão Preto/Brazil

by Celiane Camargo-Borges, Carla Guanaes and Emerson F. Rasera.

The Brazilian Healthcare System faced many challenges in implementing the new principles of universality of access, comprehensive care, decentralization and social participation. In this article, we present three examples of how group practices influenced by constructionist ideas promote local changes essential to the transformation of the Healthcare System. The first example focuses on interdisciplinary health work. The second is an example of social participation in health politics and the final case illustrates community engagement in the process of producing/delivering healthcare.

Image and Success: Collaboration and AI with a Law Firm in Mexico City

by Sylvia London

This article provides an example of applying principles and ideas that come from social constructionism, positive psychology and flow as a way to develop appreciative organizations in the professional world. The use of professional tools such as the Via Signature Strength Questionnaire prepares the participants and orients them towards their strengths. It also opens the door to a working atmosphere centered on collaboration, possibilities and Appreciative Inquiry. Last but not least, it allows highlighting the organizational strengths and creates a sense of bonding and hope for the future.

Therapeutic Stances in the Construction of the Psychologist as a Partner



by Emerson F. Rasera

This article describes the use of therapeutic stances in developing a process of collaboration among professionals and people living with AIDS. The process was developed within a Brazilian non-governmental organization (NGO), the Grupo Humanitário de Incentivo à Vida. As a psychologist, I participated in the founding of the organization, assisting in the process of defining its organizational structure. Furthermore, as the NGO was originally a self-help group which I facilitated, I describe in this article the trajectory of my transformation from the role of therapist to that of project manager.

Provoking New Management Learning



by Caroline Ramsey

In this article Caroline Ramsey uses ideas from Frank Farrelly’s “Provocative Therapy” to develop new ways of supporting management learning. In particular, she argues for a treatment of managing that emphasises the creativity of managers’ moment-by-moment relations and down plays the importance of management theory.

Turning the 360^o feedback method into a Dialogical Process

  
by Jorma Ahonen

This article asks readers to rethink “regular main stream tools” of organizational development. Using two case examples it introduces a dialogic approach as an alternative and supplement to such tools using the 360° feedback method as an example of how to turn such “tools” into a more dialogic “process.”