Different questions, new conversations and ‘better’ actions
Reflective Learning-UK (RL-UK) is a strengths-based, social enterprise. We try to improve lives and livelihoods through strengths-based approaches that aim to enhance human flourishing and develop positivity. Our aim is to amplify strengths, positivity, success and innovation.
PARTICIPATORY and APPRECIATIVE ACTION and REFLECTION (PAAR) is a new strengths-based methodology that helps improve lives and livelihoods.
How often do you feel really appreciated, rather than under-appreciated?
When do you have the chance to be the best that you can be? To do what you do best every day?
How much of your work focuses on developing and sustaining what you want and that which is desired, rather than preventing, treating or getting rid of that which is undesired - the deficit?
How far do we need to study sadness to understand happiness? Should we study bullying if we wish to develop positive work relationships? Study work overload if we wish to know more about work-life balance? If we study hopelessness, we can learn a lot about it. But this tells us very little about hope. If we learn about what went wrong, about the mistakes we have made, we can learn a great deal about ‘wrongness’ and mistakes. We learn little about ‘rightness’ and success. If we try to get rid of the ‘bad’ in the hope that we will become ‘good’, we might be in danger of simply becoming ‘not bad’! How hard is it for you to get into a mindset where you focus on positives? What are these in your life and work, your organisation and communities? What is the value of focusing on what you can do, rather than on what you can’t?
What helps us be successful, to win, to achieve and flourish? Is it strategies that fix our weaknesses or ones that help build our strengths? Maybe it's something of both? In every team, work group, organisation and community, people are not the greatest asset! People’s strengths are the greatest asset. A strength is not just a gift or talent. It is something that you can do again and again….and under pressure. Strengths are also developmental. They can change with time. Developing strengths is not about list building, but adapting and adjusting them to be of the best use in particular contexts. Because dealing positively with the unknown and unexpected is so important, we should continuously reflect upon the nature of our strengths and try to broaden our strengths repertoire. The skill is using the right strength at the right time, in the right way, and having the courage and clarity of thinking to modify and develop new strengths. So what are your strengths? How self-aware of them are you?
Focusing on building and utilizing strengths is not simply giving ourselves permission to ignore those things that need to change. Permission to ignore weaknesses. Neither are strengths-based approaches an exercise in self-indulgence simply because we are focusing on what we feel we are good at, enjoy doing, and on those things that might nourish us. Developing, utilizing and modifying strengths is tough work. Especially when our natural default position is to think about problems and deficits. Having strengths, is not in itself, enough for positive transformational change and improvement. They need to be coupled with positivity, as this broadens our thinking about what is possible, makes us more creative and more receptive to new ways of doing things.
Strengths-with-positivity brings with it the promise of being able to build a better future.
The extracts below, are from a participatory video made in East Africa, Moshi, Tanzania in May 2009, organized jointly by EASUN (www.easun-tz.org) and Reflective Learning - UK. PAAR workshop participants illustrate the notion of space through song and poetry.
Participatory and appreciative action and reflection (PAAR) - democratizing reflective practices
Authors: Tony Ghaye (a); Anita Melander-Wikman (b); Mosi Kisare (c); Philip Chambers (a); Ulrika Bergmark (d); Catrine Kostenius (e); Sue Lillyman (f)
The paper introduces a new approach to reflecting and acting called participatory and appreciative action and reflection (PAAR). It explores its potential to enable individuals and groups to move forward, to improve their working practices and lives in particular communities and contexts. The paper situates PAAR in the historical context of participatory and action research and reflective learning. It suggests that using PAAR requires four strategic 'turns'. By turn we mean a change in direction from one way of thinking and practising to another. The four turns are: (i) away from a preoccupation with changing behaviours in order to solve problems, with 'fixing' things and an engagement in deficit-based discourses, towards the development of appreciative insight, understanding the root causes of success and sustaining strengths-based discourses in order to amplify those things that will help build a better future from the positive present; (ii) away from self-learning (individualism and isolation) and towards collective learning through interconnectedness, appreciative knowledge sharing and the use of new forms of communications technology which enable simultaneous action in dispersed geopolitical spaces; (iii) away from one way of knowing and one perspective on truth to an acceptance of more pluralistic view of ways of knowing, of understanding human experience and putting this knowing to good use; (iv) away from reflective cycles and spirals and towards the use of a reflective learning (r-learning) framework comprising four mutually supportive processes. They are those of developing an appreciative 'gaze', of reframing lived experience, of building practical wisdom and of achieving and moving forward.
