Positive Psychology and Change

Foreword by David L. Cooperrider

What Will the Future of Organization Development and Change Look Like?

The future is here—in this book.

Beginning in the 1980’s 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 logic—or illogic—of wanting to rally and “inspire” people to change by focusing the field’s most powerful deficit-analytic tools on a person or system’s weaknesses, dysfunctions, and root causes of failure? Really?¹

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.²

Well it never, ever worked to inspire and motivate in the sense that people clearly learned tons about the causes of low morale—because that’s what the diagnostic process set out to document—but 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 ...