Appreciative-Leadership

Chapter 2
The Leadership Story: Thinking Differently about Leadership, Appreciative Organisation, Appreciative Leadership and Appreciative Inquiry
Caring for Excellence: The What and the When
The Appreciative Organisation is ambitious about policy, procedure and process and how these serve people to
deliver excellence. It is focused on aligning these to best practice and using information to celebrate success,
share learning, continuously innovate and improve the service that it delivers. In the Appreciative Organisation,
information management is a supportive, not dominant function.
In caring for the information, the Appreciative Organisation:
• Puts the people who use policy, procedure and process at the heart of their continuous improvement
• Joins up policy, procedure and process in a meaningful way
• Focuses on robust and transparent systems to deliver for patients/service users
• Creates space to imagine new and different ways of delivering services
• Rewards ideas, creativity and innovation
Appreciative Leaders support this by:
• Creating the expectation and the space for conversations about policy, procedure and process and how this
is serving patients/service users
• Enabling individuals and teams to be creative and innovative in how they deliver services in line with policy,
procedure and process
• Developing a culture of process improvement in their teams
• Encouraging a culture of sharing learning across traditional boundaries
• Holding people accountable for their use of policy, procedure and process
Appreciative Inquiry could include:
• If I was to invite you to be really ambitious about the future of our service, what do you envision
• What is at the heart of excellence in your work
• What would you do tomorrow in your service if success was guaranteed
• What’s the boldest and biggest idea you have about improving things for service users/patients
• What’s the improvement conversation that you have been putting off having
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