Announcing the August 2010 AI Practitioner

Measuring the Impact of Appreciative Inquiry in the Private Sector

Guest editors:
Susan Donnan and David Shaked

This issue of AI Practitioner is special for several reasons:

It is our 50th issue! Many thanks to our readers and the hundreds of people who have contributed to AIP as guest editors and authors since 1998.

You can see the opening article of this issue here.

Susan Donnan and David Shaked bring together a rich selection of articles in this relatively unexplored area.

• Results of using AI in challenging situations:
  • a production facility about to be shut down tranforming itself into Most Wanted and then Best in Class.
  • 24/7 environment of academic medicine where an effective team can mean the difference between life and death.
• Outcomes in large and small businesses.
• New models generated: 'Double-Loop 5D-AI process' and 'Appreciative Auditing'.
• Metrics, Scorecards and Performance Reviews upgraded by applying an appreciative, strength-based approach.

In Research Notes, a PhD thesis shows AI research bridging academic study and practice in nursing for dementia and their carers. Please let us know about other PhD students who are using AI as the basis for their research.

The second AI Resources column answers the question: ‘What’s a good book to learn more about the basics of AI?' This is a useful source to share with others.

More about the articles.

More about the articles:

In From Crisis to Global Competitiveness: Learning from a Spectacular Journey, Henrik Kongsbak describes a success story of how a manufacturing facility in Denmark transformed itself from being unwanted and destined for closure, to Most Wanted, and then to Best in Class.

Katia van Belle, in Building a Cohesive Team at ING, shows how the back office of a large bank in Belgium went from low employee morale to building a new culture where they handled difficult situation themselves.

Changing HR leaders’ beliefs can be a powerful lever for sustainable organisational change. In Generating Leadership Possibilities: An AI Way for Developing HR Change Leadership, R. Sanker, Hardik Shah and Wasundhara Joshi describe their impact at a large steel mill in India.

Annet van de Wetering pioneered an appreciative approach to auditing with the Zaans Medical Center in the Netherlands over a period of five years (2005–2010). The auditors were the hospital workers themselves. See Appreciative Auditing.

In SOARing for Sustainability: Longitudinal Organizational Efforts Applying Appreciative Inquiry, Gina Hinrichs shares with us her longitudinal experience applying the SOAR framework for strategic planning at EarthCo in the United States.

Results were achieved in three areas in Advanced Measurements (AMI), a small technology company in Canada: exceptional customer experiences, unleashing the potential in people and prolific market presence. Mike King and Fanny Tamegnon are the authors of Unleashing Potential through Appreciative Inquiry.

In Successful Adaptation of Appreciative Inquiry in Academic Medicine, Julie Haizlip, Margaret Plews-Ogan and colleagues describe how the UVA Health System have innovatively adapted Appreciative Inquiry to work with physicians, nurses and medical technicians who were initially uncomfortable with AI.

David Shaked, in A Strength-based Approach to Metrics, Scorecards and Performance Reviews, presents ways of applying Appreciative Inquiry principles to measurements and their review process and also sets out where organisations can start to do this.