Richard Frankel is professor of Medicine and Geriatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine(IUSM) and a staff member in the Education institute of Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Frankel is a medical educator and health services researcher who has spent the past 35 years focusing on strategies to improve communication and relationships between individual doctors and patients and more recently in teams and organizations. He has consulted to a number of large medical organizations on ways to transform their culture based on their positive accomplishments. He is a member of the Cleveland Clinic Professionalism Council and at IUSM leads the ASPIRE (Advanced Scholars Program for Internists in Research and Education).

Harry (Bud) Isaacson, MD, FACP is the Assistant Dean for Clinical Education and Associate Professor of Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine (CCLCM). He currently oversees all clinical training for CCLCM and co-directs the “Foundations of Clinical Medicine Course”. In addition he serves Chair of the Professionalism Council and a member of the Board of Governors at Cleveland Clinic . He helped develop and lead a new Cleveland Clinic on-boarding program in 2011 which includes the “To Act as a Unit” series on professionalism Dr. Isaacson is currently leading an effort to enhance the Annual Professional Review (APR) at Cleveland Clinic using Appreciative Inquiry. He has led the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation’s Roundtable on Professionalism for 5 years and is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians.

Service economies, like healthcare, are relationship-based and sensitive to the local cultural context in which they operate. In the 1980’s, David Cooperrider, a professor at Case Western University and a student of organizational behavior, noted that when organizations focused on what they were doing well, and how to get more of it, the quality of both goods and services improved. Dubbed “Appreciative Inquiry” (AI), this positive approach to organizational culture has grown exponentially and there is evidence to show that it is good for both employees and the bottom line.

In this webinar, we will review the history of AI and focus especially on the use of appreciative story telling as an organizational culture change strategy. We will also illustrate some simple techniques for bringing AI to participants’ organizations with optimal chances for success.

Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of the webinar, participants will be able to:

• Describe the difference between production- and relationship based organizational culture
• Understand the role and power of story-telling in organizational work life
• Immediately implement one or more appreciative practices in their workplace