Appreciative-Leadership

Chapter 3
The Practitioner’s Story: Appreciative Organisation, Appreciative Leadership and Appreciative Inquiry
Story 4: An Appreciative Leadership Journey
My name is Ian Harbison and I have worked in the field of Violence Reduction for 11 years, providing education
programmes to large groups of direct care staff and advice to clinical teams who are providing care and treatment
to service users with disturbed and violent behaviours.
The “holy grail” of my profession has been focussed on finding the answer to the infinite question of how to
achieve a cultural shift toward violence reduction. In essence, this is about how to unpick and de-construct the
very damaging “Zero Tolerance” approach to violence within the NHS.
Although born out of the best intentions, the Zero Tolerance campaign that was at the forefront of the NHS
approach to violence management, unfortunately had the negative effect of categorising care givers as “good”
and the perpetrators of violence, aggression, anger and frustration as “bad”, irrespective of the circumstances
surrounding a person’s anger and frustration. Within the field of mental health, the Zero Tolerance campaign
also encouraged services to focus on the intrinsic behaviours of service users whilst negating the more obvious
precursors to violence such as the environment and culture of a service in itself.
Coupled with this Zero Tolerance approach, the answer to violence, particularly within mental health services,
throughout the 1990s and 2000s was the mass roll-out of an education programme primarily focused on the
“management of violence” through the use of restraint techniques, commonly known as “Control & Restraint”.
It was against this backdrop that myself and colleagues found ourselves “fighting” against, with a genuine desire
to shift the culture and attention away from the “management of violence” towards a real understanding of what
causes violence and what can we do to reduce this and its cousin – control and restraint.
We were aware that in order to refocus the approach on violence, we had to address the culture of the service
providing care. However, this had actually become our Achilles heel. How do you change a culture as complex and
diverse as that found in the NHS
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