Lewis - Positive psychology and change: how leadership, collaboration, and appreciative inquiry create transformational results

1. Chapter 01

1. Chapter 06
2. Chapter 10

Sarah Lewis

This edition first published 2016
2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

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To Jem, Jordan, and Rhia.
who enrich my life beyond measure

Sarah Lewis is a chartered psychologist, an Associated Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and a founder and Principal Member of the Association of Business Psychologists. She holds a masters degree in occupational and organizational psychology, attained with distinction, and a certificate in systemic consultation. She is a specialist Appreciative Inquiry practitioner and an expert at facilitating large group events.

She is the managing director of Appreciating Change and is an experienced organizational consultant and facilitator who has been actively involved in helping people and organizations change their behavior for over 25 years. Her clients include local government, central government, not-for-profit organizations, and private sector clients, particularly in the manufacturing, financial, and educational sectors.

When positive psychology burst onto the scene, Sarah quickly realized that work in this area both chimed with her practice and offered robust theoretical support to Appreciative Inquiry as an approach to organizational change. She integrates these two approaches in her work and is delighted to be able to extend, explore, and share this connection in this book.

Sarah has lectured at postgraduate level and continues to be a regular conference presenter in the United Kingdom and internationally. She writes regularly for publication, is the lead author of Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management: Using AI to Facilitate Organizational Development (2007), and is author of Positive Psychology at Work, published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2011.

Sarahs work can be viewed on her website (

The future is herein this book.

Beginning in the 1980s one could sense it, that is, the urge to create a positive revolution in change. First there were theoretical and conceptual calls questioning the inherently awkward logicor illogicof wanting to rally and inspire people to change by focusing the fields most powerful deficit-analytic tools on a person or systems weaknesses, dysfunctions, and root causes of failure? Really?

Remember, for example, the era in Organization Development (OD) of sophisticated and statistically refined low morale surveys: first would come the documentation on a scale of 1-7 of morale among employees, and then the cascading feedback, endless meetings, and subsequent interventions designed to remove the root causes of usually the lowest levels of morale. It was like attempting to remedy a dark room by focusing on darkness.

Well it never, ever worked to inspire and motivate in the sense that people clearly learned tons about the causes of low moralebecause thats what the diagnostic process set out to documentbut the analysis or search rarely if ever surfaced any kind of substantive (and inspiring) new knowledge, for example, about surprising hot teams or extraordinary times of enterprise flourishing or times when people were so turned on and called by a powerful purpose greater than themselves that they would contribute far beyond their job descriptions. Even if those exceptional moments were fleeting and rare, it still never occurred to the field of OD and change management that layered into the narratives of those positive deviations were the most natural and most consistently powerful cognitive, positive emotional, imaginative, and supercooperative seeds of human system change available. If there were debilitating patterns of problematic dysfunctions and breakdowns in an organization, of what possible use could it possibly be to go off on a tangential search of times of peak performance, positive deviance, or a deep dive analysis into the positive core of all past, present and future capacity in a system? It was as if this materialthis universe of strengths and understanding of history as positive possibilitywas irrelevant and of little use for human system development, change, and elevationary transformation.

Paradigms are like that. They are stubborn. They can blind us. Perhaps that's why we still thrill to it, that is, Einsteins often-quoted words when he said:

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. We must learn to see the world anew.

Albert Einstein

Sarah Lewis, in this volume, not only helps leaders and managers, change agents, and even parents and coaches, to see the world anew but she helps us to see change anew