12 Appreciative Inquiry in RRU Mid-Career Student Life
12 Appreciative Inquiry in RRU Mid-Career Student Life
Niels Agger-Gupta
Associate Professor
School of Leadership Studies
Royal Roads University
Ann Perodeau
Associate Faculty
School of Business
Royal Roads University
Abstract
The MA-Leadership (MAL) Program features an adult learning model and highlights three elements of the RRU Learning and Teaching Model (LTM): “facilitate authentic, challenging, collaborative and engaging learning experiences”; “focus on applied research-informed learning”; and “create learning conditions that are respectful, welcoming and inclusive.” How these LTM elements have worked for Royal Roads University students in the context of a relatively new approach to organizational change—Appreciative Inquiry—is presented and recommended as an effective approach that strongly supports the LTM.
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Introduction
Since the first cohort of the Master of Arts in Leadership (MAL) program opened at Royal Roads University in 1996, our students, mid-career professionals with a minimum of five years of leadership experience in hand, have been leading a final-year inquiry-based change process in a real world organization as their capstone project. These action research projects have taken place in organizations in every sector, including business, education, government at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels, policing and the military, healthcare, and non-profit social services agencies. The project requires the student to engage a senior organizational leader as a project sponsor, while working with an academic supervisor from RRU. With the Sponsor and Supervisor, the student creates a collaborative action research inquiry topic that helps organizational stakeholders come to some agreements and new directions on an opportunity or innovative change, leading to new knowledge for the organization or the field. Topics have ranged from improving leadership training, redesigning health systems, LEAN implementations, succession planning, employee engagement, municipal re-development, and program planning, to name only a few. The student’s task is to meaningfully—and ethically—engage the stakeholders about the leadership issue or opportunity, create opportunities for dialogue, facilitate new and generative collective understandings, and foster generative group decision-making on next steps (Rowe, Piggot-Irvine, Graf, Agger-Gupta, & Harris, 2013).
The MAL Program and Four Principles
The MAL program consists of two years of interdisciplinary study where students focus on relevant, real world opportunities to address leadership issues and challenges through projects grounded in a rigorous theoretical understanding of the nature of organizations, organizational change, and the changing role of leadership in the contemporary contexts of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (or VUCA—see Johansen, 2012). The program is competency-based and focuses on adult learning, individual values and culture, inter-personal and group communi