CWRU Weatherhead School of Management and Social Innovations in
Global Management
by Jeff Bendix
In 1995 David Cooperrider, associate professor of
organizational behavior in Case Western Reserve University's
Weatherhead School of Management, came across a small item buried in
the "Religion" section of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The
article described an idea put forward by the Reverend William Swing,
Episcopal bishop of California, for developing a forum where leaders
of the world's religions could meet to talk and resolve their
differences -- a sort of United Nations of religions.
Cooperrider, who is also director of the school's Social
Innovations in Global Management (SIGMA) program, was
intrigued. SIGMA's purpose is to study just this kind of international
initiative. He wrote to ask Rev. Swing if SIGMA could follow his
efforts.
A few days later Rev. Swing called. "Dave, I don't want you
just to study this," he said. "We need a school of
management's help to guide us through the strategic planning process,
and to work with us for at least five years. Our goal is to have this
in place by the year 2000."
Since then, Cooperrider and SIGMA have helped guide Rev. Swing's
United Religions Initiative through six regional conferences around
the world, three global summits in San Francisco, and putting together
a draft charter. On January 25, Cooperrider hosted him for a day of
meetings with religious leaders and the media in Cleveland, and with
Kim Cameron, Weatherhead's dean.
Cooperrider's interest in the birth and development of new forms of
human cooperation and global action organizations dates to the
mid-1980s, when he and others in the organizational behavior
department developed a groundbreaking method for studying
organizations called appreciative inquiry.
"The term incorporates the dictionary definitions of both
words," explained Cooperrider. "Appreciation means being
able to see the best in another human being. It also means to increase
in value. To inquire means to explore, to systematically study.
"So what appreciative inquiry means is the systematic study of
what gives life to human organizations when they are most effective,
and to do the study in a way that helps those efforts increase in
value. In our work, inquiry and change are a simultaneous
moment."
Cooperrider subsequently developed what he terms "appreciative
inquiry summit methodology," by which groups of scores, or even
hundreds, come together to do planning for an organization. That is in
contrast to conventional organizational wisdom, which says that the
most effective size for a planning group is six to eight. But with
groups that small, says Cooperrider, even the best planning model
frequently breaks down when the time comes to implement it.
"By the time it gets rolled out, the plan has either become
irrelevant, or no one understands the subtleties and the rationale for
it. So the question is, why don't organizations bring the whole system
together to do that planning? Bring together all the best knowledge
from the plant floor to the CEO to the customer to the supplier?"
The appreciative inquiry summit methodology is designed to overcome
the traditional problems posed by bringing together large groups for
strategic planning. Cooperrider recently convened 2,400 leaders of
United Way chapters from around the country to reconceptualize the
organization for the future.
"It is the most exciting work I do, bringing people together
across every boundary imaginable, because what happens is that the
very best in people comes out," he says. "People are so
happy and articulate when they come together with common concerns and
to share a common vision. When people see the whole system, it becomes
like what the astronauts used to experience when they would look back
at earth -- instant global consciousness."
SIGMA got its start in 1989 with the goal of focusing on research,
learning and consulting activities for global programs such as
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and the
Nature Conservancy. "We initially planned it as a 10-year
research project, but now it looks like it will become a lasting
program. My hope is that it will someday become an endowed center at
the Weatherhead School," says Cooperrider.
In recent years, the U.S. Agency for International Development
(AID) has provided $6.5 million to help establish a center for
management and leadership development for international nonprofit
organizations. According to Cooperrider, SIGMA has probably generated
more funding for Weatherhead than any other research project in its
history.
Another initiative in which SIGMA has been involved was suggested a
few years ago by the Dalai Lama of Tibet, a spiritual leader of
Buddhism. The Dalai Lama felt that many of the world's religious-based
conflicts could be avoided if religious leaders got to know one
another. He suggested establishing a private, unstructured forum where
leaders of the world's religions could talk.
Representatives of many of the world's religions met November 9 in
Washington, D.C. to begin discussing the idea, and Cooperrider was
there to use appreciative inquiry to facilitate the meeting.
"My task was to help the group launch an inquiry into the best
of each other's beliefs and histories," Cooperrider said. "I
shared a vision I had, reminding them of the time South Africa was
drafting a new constitution for the post-apartheid era, and Nelson
Mandela (head of the African National Congress) and William de Klerk
(former president of South Africa) spontaneously held up each other's
hands at a soccer stadium.
"I think five years from now something like that could happen
among the world's religious leaders, and that image could change human
relationships more than a meeting of any heads of state."
It might seem as though facilitating religious initiatives and
studying nonprofits is a long way from a management school's
traditional role of training managers, but Cooperrider insists that is
not the case.
"Peter Drucker has argued for years that management is not
just business management, but bringing people together for the
cooperative realization of dreams," he said. "We think that
management should be a noble profession, that it should have some
higher aspiration. In law, the value aspiration is justice. In
medicine, it is the absence of disease. In management, it is to help
enlarge humanity's cooperative capacity."
Cooperrider points out that the number of organizations of the type
SIGMA studies -- international, business, nonprofit, and nongovernment
-- is mushrooming, thanks in large part to advances in communication
technology. That, he believes, puts mankind on the verge of a new era
of global cooperation, where differences between peoples and nations
will be less important. His work with the Teledesic Corporation, a
company putting up 400 low-orbit satellites for a seamless global
communications network, is an example.
Cooperrider's vision of the future contrasts with the one Harvard
University professor Samuel Huntington spelled out in his 1996 book,
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington
predicts that with the end of the conflict between capitalism and
communism, new struggles will emerge among the world's different
religions, ethnic groups and cultures, similar to what has happened in
the former Yugoslavia.
"What sets our work apart from Harvard's research,"
Cooperrider said, "is that we are seeing the emergence of a
totally opposite pattern. The larger story is about unprecedented new
forms of cooperation, not just separation and clash. Breakthroughs are
occurring everywhere as the urge for connection expresses itself. We
are seeing the eclipse of the barriers, and the end of the limits to
human cooperation. It is time for rethinking human relationships of
all kinds -- including the relationships among people and leaders of
the world's religions. It's a fascinating story that needs to be
better understood."
Cooperrider quotes Albert Einstein: "'A human being is part of
a whole we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. He
experiences thought and feelings as something separated from the rest.
This delusion ... restricts our affections to the few persons nearest
to us. Our task must be to free ourselves to widen our circle of
compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature.'
"I think that's where we're at today," Cooperrider adds.
"Through better management, through the telecommunications
revolution, we're learning how to widen those circles. And as we do,
tremendous resources and energies are going to be found to deal with
the world's most pressing issues. I think we are on the edge of
something really important and unique -- a new story of human
cooperation and global action."
In 2002 Sigma changed its name to Institute for Advanced
Appreciative Inquiry.
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