PARADIGMES
APPRECIATIFS

Each of us has a set of beliefs about how the world is organized and how it works. At the level of an organization, this becomes the culture of the organization.  It is important to take a step back and be aware of the paradigms in which we operate and the usual paradigms of the people and organizations that we are called to support.

It is these paradigms, often implicit, that drive our understanding of the world and that lead us to intervene.
These paradigms are co-existing and are adapted according to the circumstances. With a lot of humor, Jane Magruder Waktins, the pioneer of Appreciative Inquiry, once told us during an intervention: if my car breaks down at the side of the road, I hope the mechanic will have a paradigm 1 perspective for fix it!

In Change at the Speed of Imagination, Magruder Watkins, Kelly and Mohr discuss the emerging paradigm of organizational change and development (OD). This paradigm is based on developments in the social and natural sciences over the past 50 years, from biology to the theory of complexity passing by new theories and practices of the development of organizations. This emerging paradigm is constantly evolving, even as we wrote this book; The following table shows the general tendencies. It is important to clarify that the two paradigms are important and do not exclude each other, but marry each other like this DNA that is between the two columns