A Design Framework: The ABC Model

This organization inquiry model is designed to inquire into the current reality of an organization and to plan its future by focusing on the successes and the life-giving forces that support the work and the people. Once those forces are located and articulated, the organization can move to affirm, expand, and increase those success factors as they imagine the organization’s future. This is a departure from the traditional model of organization diagnosis that searches for the problems and shortcomings of the organization for the purpose of “fixing” it.

This appreciative approach is grounded in the theory of Social Constructionism (Gergen, 1991, 1994a, 1994b) that holds organizations as social constructions of those who inhabit and “talk” in them. If organizations are imagined and made by human beings, then they can be remade and re-imagined. The constraints of scientific management theory that images organizations as machines are lifted and the possibility of new approaches and configurations emerges. We create what we imagine!

The model as presented in Figure 8.1 is an example of a global international development organization. The sample items in each of the three rings and the explanations of those items are meant to be an example. When it is used to facilitate organization design, the organization begins by building the three circles to fit their own organization structure followed by applying the ABC process to the circles they create.

Figure 8.1. Model for Organization Inquiry

Developed by Jane Magruder Watkins and Davis Cooperrider.

Assumptions of the Organization Inquiry Model

The Organization Inquiry Model is built on several assumptions. The first assumption is that the central organizing principles of organizations are the clarity about the ultimate impact of the work, the core values that are shared, and a common mission of a group of people who work together to meet the mission and goals of the organization. These critical ingredients provide the foundation for the organization. Without clarity and consensus on these ingredients, no amount of organizational excellence related to task and management will insure survival. Conversely, organizations with clarity on the Impact they want to make, shared understanding of their core value and agreement on their mission can survive a great deal of imperfection and ambiguity in their organizational forms. Therefore, the premier task of every organization is to carry on a continuous dialogue making meaning of their work. The definitions of the following terms here are:

The second assumption is that organizations are Networks. In this model, what is usually called the “organization,” that is, the staff that works in the headquarters office and in the field offices, is called the Team and is seen as the coordinating body for the Network Organization. The organization is envisioned as a network of key stakeholders who gather around the desired Impact, Values, and Mission to accomplish tasks that lead to social transformation. The Network Organization might include the Team; a Board; Donors; Partners; Alliances; and, frequently, Volunteers. Definitions of these terms are described below. However, each organization will have a unique set of actors in this circle. This model describes one possible configuration.

The third assumption is that in addition to the core of the organization and the leadership network, there are key areas for inquiry on the ways the organization organizes its work. Inquiry into these areas enables groups to discover the life-giving forces, success stories, and generative spirit of their organizations. In this model, example areas for inquiry include Pathway, Governance, Systems, Structure, People, Programs, Sustainability, and Environment. These terms are defined as:

How to Use the Organization Inquiry Model

For each of the elements in (1) the core circle; (2) the network organization circle, and (3) the organization of work circle, you will use the ABCs:

A. Appreciative Understanding of Your Organization

The process begins with your inquiry into your own organization that will provide a clear picture of your organization’s strengths, competencies, and life-giving forces. Using this approach, you look for those moments when your organization is at its very best. Using an interview process, members of your staff can interview each other in search of organizational excellence.

Questions might include:

B. Benchmarked Understanding of Other Organizations

Once you have initiated the process in your own organization, you may want to seek out and understand the best practices of other organizations. This is best done as a reciprocal process in which you also share your best practices. Such mutual sharing gives both organizations a way to inform their own practices and to adapt and incorporate some ideas that can inspire innovation and improvement.

Often organizations seek out similar groups to “benchmark,” but there can be rich learning and exchange between even the most diverse organizations. Negotiations with potential benchmarking partners should include the parameters of the exchange and agreement on questions to be asked.

Sample questions include:

These questions are intended to be examples only. You will construct questions appropriate to the study that you want to do.

C. Creation of “Provocative Propositions” to Image Your Organization’s Future

Once you have gathered information from your own organization and have benchmarked several other organizations, it is time to make sense of that information in search of an image of the current reality that will serve as a springboard to creating an image of your organization’s future. This is an exercise that can be carried out at every level of the organization with any mix of staff and stakeholders. The process includes sharing the information and stories gathered from the Appreciative Inquiry of your own organization and the best practices gathered from other organizations. This sharing is best done as a dialogical process with any written report aimed at capturing the highlights from the stories and sharing the high points of the process itself.

A mechanical reporting of facts will not usually lead to exciting “propositions.” Once the verbal or written story of the process is finished, the group moves to create the most exciting possible future for the organization that incorporates the best that exists within, plus new and exciting practices discovered from without. Possibility propositions are written as though they are already happening, in the present tense. These become visions for the organization that guides planning and operations in the future.

This ABC process can be used to study every facet of an organization. This model suggests that an organization needs to look, at a minimum, at the two levels described in this framework:

Finally, it is essential that some other interactive process be embedded in the organization as an ongoing dialogue, constantly appreciating, reframing, and sharing the life of the people and the meaning of the work that make up the organization. It is this community meaning-making that creates a flexible, grounded, generative organization. The ABC model can be used as a framework for the ongoing conversations that will create a true learning organization. As the conversation deepens and expands, the framework itself will be changed and embellished as needed to facilitate the learning about the growth and change that are life-giving forces in all organizations.

Example of an Application of the ABC Model

The ABC Model was used by an international development agency for their strategic planning process. Following are some of the ways they created the model to fit their own organization. We are including here only a partial reporting of the very complex process that was carried out over a year’s time. The important illustration is the way the organization design model was used to consolidate the work into a planning document that was presented to the parent organization in the Philippines. During the several months prior to the workshop, the organization had used an AI interview process with all of the stakeholders that they have listed in the middle circle. And they had asked questions about the business processes that they have in the outer circle. Following the circle diagram we have included some of their outputs so that you can see the innovative use they made of the model.

Figure 8.2. Example of the ABC Inquiry Model

Framework: Areas Addressed in the Strategic Planning Process

• Programs
  • Training
  • Collaborative Field Projects
  • Documentation
  • Publications
  • Workshops and Conferences
• Governance
  • IIRR Board
  • Africa Regional Office Advisory Council
• Structure
  • Management and Operations
  • Communities
  • Organization
  • Relationships
  • Teamwork
• People
  • Human Resources and Personnel Policy
  • Policy and System
  • Staff Development
  • Equal Employment Opportunity
• Resources
  • Fundraising
  • Facilities
  • Materials
• Environment
  • Image
  • Networking
• Systems
  • Monitoring and Evaluation
  • Management Information Systems (MIS)
  • Resource Management

Planning Areas and Team Assignments

IIRR: What We Do

In partnership with disadvantaged communities, IIRR enables people to achieve their full potential.

We with other organizations (CBOs, NGOs, and governments²) enable them to help the disadvantaged by building their capacity through:

• Training and mentoring
• Technical assistance
• Publications and documentation
• Collaborative field projects and action research

Planning Teams for Strategic Areas

• Team A: Isaac, Lealem, and Mike
• Team B: John, Shashigo, Grace, and Arikew
• Team C: George, Martin, Dorothy, and Estedar

IIRR’s priority partners include organizations involved with programs in the areas of:

• Food security
• Rural development
• Environment and natural resources
• Reproductive health and HIV AIDS prevention
• Gender
• Promotion of indigenous knowledge

Our Strategic Partners

IIRR’s diverse group of strategic partners includes:

• Disadvantaged Communities—Those hardest hit by poverty in urban and rural areas with little or no access to basic services.
• Community-Based Organizations (CBOs)—Informal and formal voluntary groups organized around common interests and acknowledged by governments (cooperatives, self-help groups, etc.).
• Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs)—Non-profit organizations that operate under the legal framework of government. These are formal organizations.
• Governments—Institutions that provide legal and policy frameworks at national and local levels.
• Research and Educational Institutions—Organizations of higher learning involved in research and education (universities, colleges, vocational and technical institutes, and research centers).
• Networks—Groups of organizations and individuals formally or informally coalescing around a common cause (associations, professional societies, consortia).
• Private Sector—Organizations and individuals outside of government. These could be for profit (business, consulting firms) or non-profits (NGOs, foundations, and churches).
• Donors—Individuals or organizations that contribute funds and/or other resources. They show concern/interest in IIRR’s work and believe in its cause.
• Staff—Paid employees responsible for implementing IIRR’s programs and activities. Teamwork is a priority and the teams can utilize volunteers and interns.
• Board—A voluntary group with overall responsibility for policy and fiscal accountability. It helps generate resources and enhances the image of IIRR.

Governance for IIRR–Africa

IIRR–Africa’s management and programs are governed by a global IIRR board and board committees. IIRR’s board should be diverse and trustees should enjoy a reputation and status that will enhance the credibility of the organization.

It is recommended that IIRR global board appoint an African Advisory Council. The council will be comprised of Africans or African residents from the countries where IIRR works and who have an understanding of regional issues and challenges.

The council’s purpose will be:

• Fundraising
• Enhancing IIRR’s image in Africa
• Assisting IIRR–AFRICA in establishing partnerships in the private sector

The council will be limited to a maximum of five men and women from diverse backgrounds including the private sector, government, and international agencies.

To create a close link between the global board and the council, the council’s chair should have an automatic seat on the global board.

Program

In the next five years, IIRR–Africa will provide capacity building support to community-based organizations, small local NGOs, and government through training, mentoring, and collaborative field projects. Priority countries will be Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Tanzania. Field operational research and process documentation will be key components of the field projects.

IIRR–Africa will also document and disseminate best practices from its own experiences and those of other organizations through workshops, conferences, etc.

Specifically, IIRR–Africa will:

• Develop a comprehensive training policy
• Review curricula and develop training materials
• Conduct fifteen regional courses in project design, PM&E, and development management. Customized courses in these areas as well as in strategic planning, gender, and organizational development will be conducted as necessary.

Six collaborative field projects will be undertaken:

• Gender in Leadership and Decision-Making (Ethiopia)
• Kenya Micro-Fund
• Kenya CBO/NGO Capacity Enhancement and Technology Transfer Project
• Integrated Watershed Management (Ethiopia)
• Watershed Management (Uganda)
• Learning Our Way Out (LOWO/Family Planning in Ethiopia)
• Nairobi Urban Gardening Project (status to be determined)

In addition, IIRR–Africa will explore the potential for establishing other projects, for example:

• Partnering with universities and other academic institutions ion training and field projects
• Exploring the possibility of a training program for the youth (needs further discussion)

Ten IIRR–Africa publications are planned:

• Five on best practices
• Five manuals, two on gender and three on training

IIRR–-Africa will provide technical support to other organizations willing to document own experiences. Efforts will be made to develop local capacity in documentation.

Workshops/Conferences

• Eleven workshops, eight of which are related to gender
• Three will be exploratory workshops addressing themes of concern
• Two conferences are planned, one on gender and the other on a theme to be determined

People

In the next five years IIRR–Africa will have a standard personnel policy with clearly defined:

• Salary structure
• Benefit packages
• Performance appraisals
• Staff development
  • Performance appraisal—2000
  • Salary structure and benefit package—2001
  • Staff development plan—2001
  • Personnel manual revision—2001

Image and Networking

IIRR–Africa will create an identity and image that reflects the organization’s vision/mission/ values to promote our work in Africa.

IIRR–Africa will develop a sound public relations strategy to reflect an excellent and accountable program and to facilitate continuous dialogue with our partners in Africa’s development.

We will:

• Formulate a PR policy
• Develop and implement an effective strategy
• Train staff in PR skills

We will establish a fellowship fund to promote participation of women in development.

Networking

IIRR–Africa will strengthen its networking through publication of a newsletter to share information. We will make use of the Internet, networks, and actively participate in forums that promote our work such as conferences and workshops.

It is ideal when you can get the whole organization involved in an AI process, especially if it is focused on both a strategic planning process and a commitment to redesign their organizational architecture to fit the dreams and ideals that are formulated by the whole system through an AI interview and dialogue process. However, the chance to do such a complete process is relatively rare. But there are many other kinds of innovative uses for AI system-level intervention.

In our practices, we have had the opportunity to design an AI-based (e)valuation process for a large pharmaceutical company, parts of which we have shared in various places in this book.

Another innovation that we have used several times in a large communications company is using AI with survey feedback data. While there was a time when we might have seen AI and survey feedback as incompatible, we are now convinced, as we have said many times in this book, that almost any traditional management or organization development method can be applied in an AI-based process. The survey data is fed back to the employees as successes and opportunities. A large group of representatives from the division involved in the survey comes together to create dreams and designs of what they want to do to increase their successes and meet the challenge of those “opportunities.”

In each of these cases—the valuation project and the survey feedback summits—we have gone through lengthy design processes with internal groups to fit AI theory and practice to the organizations’ goals for the work. In both cases we were fortunate enough to have excellent internal HR and OD people to work with—in one case the group was already highly skilled in AI while in the other we began with the AI training workshop. In both cases we also had line people who were intimately involved in the work of the divisions helping with the design—and occasionally with the delivery as well. In both cases, we are seeing the impact of AI in many other related projects and activities in those companies. The more comfortable we become with the requirements of the emerging paradigm and with the social constructionist basis for the work, the easier it becomes to trust the organization and the people to know what they want and how to get it. Our work becomes both easier and more fun! And we believe that our best successes are those organizations who have taken on the AI process and made it their own. The old consultant “saw” about working ourselves out of a job can be a reality with AI. And the best part is that there always seem to be new challenges and new clients on the horizon.

In the final chapter of this book, we write about the process that is near and dear to the hearts of those who cling to the hope that there really is a best way to do a job or a task—evaluation.