Appreciative Inquiry & the Positive Organizational Scholarship of Change Leadership

Catalog description

This course explores and develops the art of reading and understanding social systems in ways that help us imagine, design and develop organization excellence. First it seeks to show how many of our conventional ideas about organizations are based on discourse and metaphors that lead us to see and understand organizations in partial and often limiting ways. Growing research from the domains of Positive Psychology and Positive Organization Scholarship and the theory and practice of Appreciative Inquiry will be explored to show how we can create new and more positive, strength-based ways of designing and developing social systems. Includes presentations, guest lectures and panel discussions on current topics of interest for the Master of Science in Leadership and Organizational Change (MLOC) candidates. Led by a faculty member of the Department of Organization Behavior, these dialogues and seminars will be presented in several of the six main residencies of the MLOC program. Reflective essays and integrative papers will enable participants to explore their practice of OD, leadership capacity, application of learnings from the program and deeply held values related to current issues and opportunities in the domain of human systems change and development. Prereq: Enrolled in the Master of Science in Leadership and Organizational Change (MLOC) program.