The Untapped Power of Discovery: How to Create Change that Inspires a Better Future
Karen Golden-Biddle
Professor Emerita, Boston University
October 23, 2024
About the talk
Navigating change is one of the hardest tasks that leaders face. How can discovery produce ahas and insights to meet the challenge of effectively leading during a time of unprecedented change? Join Karen Golden-Biddle, author of The Untapped Power of Discovery: How to Create Change that Inspires a Better Future, to learn about her compelling framework and actionable strategies that will help you champion discovery for change in work and life. Through science and storytelling, Karen will explain how to leverage opportunities once unseen, open the door to temporary not knowing, and launch new solutions that reimagine unsettled situations. Learn how you and your organization can experience remarkable benefits from catalyzing discovery.
Karen Golden-Biddle Professor Emerita, Management & Organizations, Boston University Author of The Untapped Power of Discovery: How to Create Change that Inspires a Better Future
About the talk
Navigating change is one of the hardest tasks that leaders face. How can discovery produce ahas and insights to meet the challenge of effectively leading during a time of unprecedented change? Join Karen Golden-Biddle, author of The Untapped Power of Discovery: How to Create Change that Inspires a Better Future, to learn about her compelling framework and actionable strategies that will help you champion discovery for change in work and life. Through science and storytelling, Karen will explain how to leverage opportunities once unseen, open the door to temporary not knowing, and launch new solutions that reimagine unsettled situations. Learn how you and your organization can experience remarkable benefits from catalyzing discovery.
About Golden-Biddle
Karen Golden-Biddle is an organizational ethnographer, educator, and author of The Untapped Power of Discovery. She is sought after for her voice on discovery, transformation, and navigating change.
Karen’s award-winning research on change revealed a powerful but undeveloped and undervalued leadership capacity: the practice of discovery. Her research finds that at its core, discovery depends on a process of creative inquiry that is shared and experience based. Karen is committed to supporting leaders’ efforts to cultivate discovery as a conscious practice. The Untapped Power of Discovery and website stem from that commitment.
Karen’s seminal academic work, which lays out the scholarly foundation for this book and her work with leaders, appeared in the Academy of Management Journal (2020), Academy of Management Journal (2006), Organization Science (2008), and Organization Science (2011), premier journals in organizational studies. She has also published practice-related articles, including “How to Change an Organization Without Blowing ItUp” in Sloan Management Review (2012) and “How Micro-Moves Can Drive Major Health Care Change,” appearing in Harvard Business Review(2013) online. Subsequent to publication, Karen’s article, “How to Change an Organization …” was included in the Sloan Select Collection, an assembled group of the most read and discussed articles on change management in the Sloan Management Review archive.
Karen received support for this research from the Questrom Professorship at Boston University and earlier grants awarded by The Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research and The Canadian Health Services Research Foundation.
In recognition of her lifetime contribution to the science and practice of management, in 2018, Karen was inducted as a Fellowinto the Academy of Management. Karen has also received Best Paper awards for her research and awards for her teaching.
Karen earned her undergraduate degree from Denison University, and PhD and MBA from Case Western Reserve University. She is Professor of Management and Organizations, emerita, and Faculty Fellow of the Human Resources Policy Institute at Questrom School of Business.
Keeping Mom and Pop Alive: Mapping Collective Mourning during Rapid Organizational Growth
Talk description:
When organizations grow, there can be much to grieve. New layers of management disrupt relationships, new processes disrupt routines, unfamiliar logics may guide decision making, and the purpose of the organization can be called into question. In all the change, people may feel that the organization they once knew is dying—and mourn together even as they fight to keep the old organization alive. To better understand the grief that can attend organizational growth, my study follows a community-based laboratory that morphed from 100 to 400 workers over just a few months. In repeated interviews with dozens of organization members, I watched as collective experiences of fear, anger, sorrow, and hope shaped what the company would become.
A challenge in my data analysis is a gap between the words of participants (as recorded in transcripts) and the unspoken meanings and nonconscious processes I sensed were at play. How can a researcher present in trustworthy ways things that went unheard? In this methods-focused Incubator session, I will describe my data collection and ongoing analysis and introduce a preliminary model of collective mourning in organizations. I will then invite the seed generators and attendees to share ideas for refining the analysis—and how that analysis is presented, as well.
Research is the heart of Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS), and we want to make sure that we support each other in developing high quality research. To that end, we created the Adderley Positive Research Incubator for sharing and encouraging POS-related research ideas that are at various stages of development.
1. Engage people meaningfully and respectfully by adopting a more sustainable, less disruptive “micro-moves” approach. http://bit.ly/1MoLIUm [Click to tweet!]
2. Micro-moves are valuable resources that activate hope and momentum for change. http://bit.ly/1MoLIUm [Click to tweet!]
3. Micro-moves support and challenge people to generate new possibilities and energize them to work together. http://bit.ly/1MoLIUm [Click to tweet!]
