Cultural change: towards an appreciative culture

On many occasions, cultural change is a matter of survival. But for this reinvention process to be successful, it has to involve not only the company’s management, but also the greatest possible number of people within the organization, because it is a team task. To help our clients “change the way we change”, at Madavi we work with several methodologies, and among them, Appreciative Inquiry.

Appreciative Inquiry has an extraordinary power to drive profound change; to simultaneously transform the culture and the business of organizations. How? It’s based on a simple premise: a system moves in the direction of what it is inquiring into, that is, companies grow and develop faster, as long as they investigate what they DO have and what they DO want, instead of investigating their problems.

Both the questions that people ask themselves and the vision of an attractive image of the future that they sketch out, are two fundamental axes that make cultural change possible in organizations.

The approach is a narrative one: the person and/or organization is an open book yet to be written.

The fundamental thing is to help people reconnect with their dream, with what they really want, not with what they don’t want. At the group level, the dreams and aspirations of people and teams in their organizations are shared. What do you want the organization to be like?

Appreciative inquiry does not focus on changing people, although that is undoubtedly a highly visible side effect. It is based on the collaborative discovery of what makes the organization more effective.

When it comes to promoting and implanting an appreciative culture, the principles of abundance and simultaneity make everything much easier: this means seeing the best of what there is and bringing everyone into that attractive image of the future.

Success stories of appreciative culture

We can tell you about many success stories in this process of cultural change. You will find some in the Cases area of our website, such as Vegalsa. Their goal was to be the best in customer service and increase sales (see case), or Weleda, which was seeking to design strategies to increase sales (see case), or Red Eléctrica de España (see case). The objective of this REE project was to speed up as much as possible their major strategic challenge for the next 5 years.

Or the case of AQ Acentor | Aquila Capital who chose to work with Madavi to define the keys to success for their future projects (see case). Or Jansen, and their goal of delivering exceptional customer value and maintaining market leadership (see case), and Eroski and their challenge to become number 1 in customer satisfaction (see case), with excellent results. Or Trops, with whom we worked to define their principles and purpose (see case).