At The Supply Chain Academy, we have a longstanding tradition of working on change initiatives together with our customers, by co-designing the intervention in a way that takes into consideration our customer’s objectives, culture, communication style and concerns. We knew that the request to instigate and facilitate a behavioural change in an already successful, dynamic, growing organisation such as Anaergia, would have represented an exciting experience. Adding to the challenge, our intervention was to be delivered in a way that could minimise the risk of operational disruptions in an already busy organisation. As a result, we proposed to initiate this transformational journey with a cutting-edge change management technique, Appreciative Inquiry (AI).

The starting point, and over-arching principle, is that people, the participant in Appreciative Inquiry session(s), already have the experience, knowledge and skill to make changes effective and projects work. The guided workshop that our facilitator delivered at Anaergia, was one of SCA’s “Accelerated Development Events” aimed at providing the top team with a new tool to enable them to look at change programmes and projects from a new perspective but more importantly, more effectively together as a group. Appreciative Inquiry emphasises positive idea generation over negative problem identification. The model utilises questions and dialogue to help participants uncover existing assets, strengths, advantages, or opportunities in their organizations, or teams, and then collectively work toward developing and implementing strategies for improvement.

The first interactive session of the workshop was led by some defining questions, such as:

• What as a group, is your definition of success for the Company?
• What will make you smile and say ’we did it’ at the end of the business year?
• What do you want to be your core DNA?

The facilitator solicited feedback and interaction on the various viewpoints from the group to coach them to reach an agreed common definition of success.

This is an ongoing exercise and some other initiatives, triggered by the outcomes of the initial workshops, are still being delivered. As honest Change practitioners know, behavioural change requires persistence, personal dedication and, above all, time. And yet, the positive impact of this work with Anaergia has already been embedded in the way the organisation operates. 

In particular, the first workshop inspired by the Appreciative Inquire methodology led to noticeable results in establishing and clearly articulating a “Proposed Single Vision” for the future of Anaergia UK; participants were able to coalesce their ideas around shared leading themes to be used as guiding principles in their daily activities. A second, equally important result was achieved by carrying out a high-level review of working practices at Anaergia; at the end of the workshop, the attendees identified a list of effective habits that they had already adopted and were committed to maintain in the future (the “keep doing” habits), but also some performance-limiting actions and behaviours they wanted to eliminate (the “stop doing” habits).

It appeared that some issues underpinning these less desirable work practices could be tackled by improving the team’s appreciation of the crucial role of communication and self-awareness in improving working performance. In this respect, the Insight Discovery Programme provided the ideal forum and framework to help team members build greater understanding of themselves and their colleagues so that they could have more respectful, productive and positive working relationships, even virtually.