My non-scientific observation is that 90% of meetings we attend during the course of a typical work week deal with problems. When things go well we would rather not “waste” our time meeting with others. We get together when we face issues we cannot solve alone. As a result, a large share of the conversations we engage in while at work focus on what is not working well. And because organizational cultures are created and sustained through conversations, our bias towards negative conversations can end up taking a costly toll. 

Yet most of what happens at any reasonably well-functioning organization does work well. Much of it, extraordinarily so. At a place like Georgia Tech, everyday students of all backgrounds learn and grow, exciting research is conducted, talented students are recruited, new faculty are hired, grants are earned, gifts are raised, communities are engaged, conferences are held, discoveries are made. We just don’t spend nearly enough time talking about these things. And we should. 

Several years ago, a group of organizational behavior scholars at Case Western Reserve University started experimenting with a surprisingly simple yet revolutionary idea: what if you brought people together not to discuss problems but to reflect on what is going well? Thus was born a management tool now referred to as “appreciative inquiry.” The idea is to facilitate conversations about the things that work well in an organization—its strengths as opposed to its dysfunctions. And by doing that, it turns out, organizations can become even better. The goal is not to deny or ignore the issues that need to be addressed, but to prepare the organization to address those issues from a position of strength and confidence, grounded on a shared sense of purpose, impact and an exciting vision about the future. 

I normally start my cabinet meetings by asking my colleagues to share and celebrate the positive things, big and small, that have happened since the last time we met: a letter from a grateful student, a media story about a successful alum, an accomplishment by a faculty member, a staff member that went the extra mile to help a student. These conversations remind us of why it is we do what we do and help put us in a positive frame of reference, which is very helpful when we get into problem solving mode. 

Over the years I have found appreciative inquiry to be particularly useful when crafting a new vision. Conversations about an organization’s strengths, about when the organization is at its best, can be very effective in helping capture our collective dreams and aspirations, as well as the values, norms and shared beliefs that are needed to achieve them. These conversations can be not only productive, but inspiring and quite invigorating. 

As we craft a new vision for Georgia Tech in the coming months, which will become the foundation of our new strategic plan, I will invite our broad community to engage in these types of conversations. Earlier this week I kicked off this process with the deans and senior leadership. We started our session by identifying examples of recent accomplishments that we thought showed Georgia Tech at its best. We then dove into those examples: why do they express the best of Georgia Tech? How did those accomplishments come to be? What values, actions, decisions, culture made them possible? 

The process led to invaluable insights about our strengths and started pointing to exciting elements for our vision. It also highlighted how important it is to spend time reflecting on our strengths and that we intentionally engage in conversations about what all that is working well.