Positive Psychology at Work:

8

Positive Transformation

Recently, I spent the day working with a group of adult and children's service providers from an English county council in a large marquee at a country house hotel. Almost 150 people had come together for the conference. They were senior decision-makers from the county council, the health service and numerous voluntary sector organizations. The conference was to create a strategy for a new initiative called Think Family. I had been asked to assist the planning group to make the event ‘strengths-based’, although they weren't sure what that might entail when they asked for it.

The day was designed to have a short opening session, after which people would form groups to share stories of excellent work in the past where they had really helped people make a difference to their lives by ‘thinking family’. We would share some of these with the whole group and then people would again work in groups to imagine a future in two years’ time where Think Family was an integral part of the county landscape. They would come back with visual, creative and impact-full images of this future to share. Finally, people would work in groups on any topic relevant to the theme to start working out how to move things forward. After the initial half hour the chairs would never again be facing forward in ‘conference’ style, but would be constantly rearranged as the system in the room took different shapes.

In the run-up to the day we had three planning meetings. The people at the ...