Earlier this year Inspire held its first Appreciative Inquiry Summit in Sydney with some of our US colleagues and supporters joining us. It was a pretty amazing affair as we shifted from being a tribal team of staff to a broad-based community with a range of supporters - it somehow made our ambition to make a global contribution to young people's mental health and wellbeing much more possible.
In the lead up to the summit we did work around our values using the work of Richard Barrett and synthesised by Lisa Doig and others who had worked with McKinsey. This included mapping our organisational values - both stated and actual - alongside our personal aspirational values. To our relief there was fair consistency across all which was very reaffirming.
The values were mapped against Maslow's hierarchy of needs with the highest two levels being Making a Difference and then Being of Service at the peak. It is interesting that the highest value is around being rather than doing although of course being of service might involve doing but it doesn't start with the action - or the urge to act. I feel this is a very important thing for us to appreciate as we look to take the impact of our programs global while also building a coherent international network with distributed leadership. Making a difference has the notion of putting my view of what needs to be done to the fore whereas being of service calls on you to do whatever is appropriate in a given situation. The former, while noble, carries with it vestiges of ego wheras true genuine service is devoid of ego - very easy to say but a much bigger challenge to embody.
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