David Cooperrider presents the sustainable design factory

October 30, 3:41 PMHouston Sustainable Business ExaminerBarbara Brown

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David Cooperrrider, founder of the Appreciative Inquiry movement, discussed his sustainable design factory process on an international teleconference, “The AI Summit: How a Single Management Innovation Changes Everything,” sponsored by Maestro Conference. David’s model connects strengths to strengths and hope to hope in a collaborative process of solutions generation.

This transformational process is based on a circles of strengths positive psychology foundation: 

• Elevation of individual strengths – each leads with their personal best (Me)
• Concentration and magnification of strengths - developing the chemistry between strengths (We)
• Refraction of our highest human strengths out into society (Positive Institutions)

David reports from his conversation with the 93-year old Peter Drucker – the task of leadership is the alignment and resonance of strengths in a way so strong that it makes the system’s weaknesses irrelevant.  Instead of simply managing the polarity between top down and bottom up planning, take a third stance, the whole systems approach, which taps the strengths of both the grass roots and the bureaucracy.  

Can sustainability quickly move beyond the great illusion of trade-off between cost and gain?  To be a sustainable innovation, the product MUST be economically sustainable.  All our issues are therefore business opportunities waiting for the right innovation.  Seeking solutions from “wholeness” brings out the best innovations.  As you extend the participating stakeholders outward to the community, suppliers, customers, etc. you become more life-centric.  Extended relationships build capacity as it becomes easy to work with the right configuration of the whole.  AI is going back to a more natural way of humans interacting. The question then becomes, can we find the simplicity beyond the complexity and bring the best of the tribal into a post post-modern world?  To find out, follow David’s work at the AI Commons.

See Susan Low’s entire graphic summary of the call at Picture your Meeting. Thanks Susan!

Participants resonated with David's new focus on the design phase of AI. Events now culminate with not only future actions, but also by developing a first prototype of a working innovation.