Business As Agent of World Benefit: An Interview with Judy Rodgers
by Kali Saposnick

from Leverage Points Issue 49

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Judy Rodgers is executive director of the Center of Business As Agent of World Benefit (BAWB), a university center of excellence at Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. BAWB is grounded in Appreciative Inquiry, a process for discovering the best in people, their organizations, and the world around them that catalyzes new thinking about goals, strategies, and organizations as systems. Judy will be speaking at the 2004 Pegasus Conference, "Building Collaborations to Change Our Organizations and the World: Systems Thinking in Action," on December 1–3 in Boston, Massachusetts. In the following interview, she talks about the potential for societal change when multiple stakeholders collaborate across sectors.

What role should business play in social issues and public policy? What kind of strategy would allow corporations to engage in societal transformation while strengthening their own business performance, growth, and development? These kinds of questions are shaping a growing discourse in the public arena. From management schools, where increasing numbers of students are committed to corporate social responsibility, to the international community, where business leaders are starting to adhere to the core values of the U.N. Global Compact, there is a growing awareness of the need for businesses to contribute to a sustainable society.

The World Inquiry into Business As Agent of World Benefit is one such effort in this direction. It was convened by faculty and students at the Weatherhead School of Management as a direct response to the events of September 11, 2001, and became the theme for the first international conference on Appreciative Inquiry, which took place only a few weeks later. Based on the outcomes from the gathering, the BAWB World Inquiry was conceptualized as a way to apply Appreciative Inquiry to the study and advancement of business and societal cooperation.

Executive director Judy Rodgers says, "In the last two to three years, the business world has been fraught with scandal and pushback on globalization. There's been a rising sense of indignation among people around the world and a call for business to take its place at the table, so to speak, in terms of world betterment. The World Inquiry, which uses Appreciative Inquiry, provides a solid framework for businesses to collaborate with society at large, because it invites people to engage in building the kinds of organizations and communities that everyone wants to work and live in."

As a collaborative tool, AI engages people at all levels in discovering what makes an organization most effective in economic, ecological, and human terms. Through customized interview guides, participants engage in interviews that focus on identifying moments of high performance in their organizations in order to discover the positive core of strengths, assets, talents, resources, and capabilities latent in the organization. These interviews ignite highly generative dialogue, which leads to transformative design and action. The hundreds of organizations using AI have applied it to virtually every aspect of business, from the creation of a core purpose and set of principles to guide the organization to the reweaving of the very fabric of its formal and informal systems, such as the way employees develop and implement business strategy or the way they organize themselves to accomplish tasks.

AI's true power emerges through inquiry into what gives life to a system when it is most alive and most successful. Such an inquiry rests on the premise that people possess high levels of competence to learn from each other, build relationships, accomplish work, and express value. In an organization that truly believes this precept, everyone feels energized by new knowledge and change.

The World Inquiry As Large-Scale Collaboration
The BAWB World Inquiry uses AI as the "engine" to search for the highest levels of innovation, best practices, and visionary leadership at the intersection of business and society. During its pilot phase, the conveners began making interview guides available to anyone interested in conducting an inquiry. As interviews were submitted, the doctoral students who staff BAWB poured over the hundreds of conversations with business leaders, social entrepreneurs, visionaries, and change leaders, searching for the most powerful stories of advancing business and societal cooperation.

One interview features successful businessman Bobby Sager, who started a foundation that applies business methods to philanthropic work in the developing world. One of Team Sager's initiatives concentrates on "microenterprise," that is, lending money and support to small projects, often in developing countries. One such project took place in Rwanda, the scene in 1994 of a horrendous genocide, with Hutus slaughtering almost a million Tutsis. The Sager Foundation wanted to encourage reconciliation between the Tutsi and Hutu tribes, so in order to qualify for the loans, women had to form partnerships across the conflict divide. In other words, the Tutsi widows and Hutu wives, whose husbands were in prison for the murders, came together in microenterprise units. In this way, business was used both to alleviate poverty and accelerate the pace of peace and stability.

The World Inquiry for BAWB is designed to expand through its collaborations with partners all over the world. Those who want to partner with the World Inquiry form an "Inquiry Community." With the help of the BAWB team, they design an AI interview with special relevance to them. They then interview business people and other leaders and submit these interviews using the special "story capture tool" on the World Inquiry web site (www.worldinquiry.org). Their data and stories remain available to them and also help to expand the growing archive of accounts of these types of collaborations.

Although BAWB is still in the early stages of defining and creating these partnerships, several are already underway. One was initiated by business people in Buenos Aires, where a recent surge in crime and kidnappings has increased concern about security. "When the group approached us for support," says Judy, "we suggested they do an inquiry into 'business as agent of peace and security.' In this kind of inquiry, they might ask the business community: 'Think of a time when you, your family, and your colleagues felt a high sense of security in Argentina. Describe the quality of life needed to live in a society where it feels safe to work, do business, and bring colleagues in from other countries. What are some of the ways that businesses can enhance the sense of safety and stability in our society?' The stories that emerge from this inquiry will not only provide data for the interviewers, but will naturally begin to influence businesses to move in new directions."

A Tool for Accelerating Social Change
Can a world inquiry actually foster societal change? According to Judy, evidence for this question already exists on a smaller scale. For example, in organizations as diverse as the U.S. Navy, Environmental Protection Agency, and British Broadcasting Communications, the process of searching for an organization's strengths, assets, and core capabilities has repeatedly produced profound transformations.

On a deeper level, says Judy, the very process of a world inquiry brings visibility to the potential of business and societal collaborations, on which BAWB plans to build in many ways. She explains, "Often the most innovative ideas happen at the periphery of a society, and it takes a long time for people to hear about them. As we mount this inquiry, and the interviews and stories start coming in, we plan to use the media to bring awareness of these innovators on the fringe to a broader audience more quickly and thereby accelerate the rate of social innovation."

Kali Saposnick is publications editor at Pegasus Communications.