Positive Image,
Positive Action

Key concepts from article

1. The artful creation of a positive, shared image of the future may well be the most prolific activity that individuals and organizations can engage in if their aim is to help bring to fruition a significant future.
    
2. Organizations (and people and societies) are largely heliotropic in character -- they exhibit a largely automatic tendency to evolve in the direction of positive anticipatory images of the future.
    
3. Imagery: Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein
    
4. Relationship between positive image and positive action: Positive imagery -- the placebo effect in medicine. Positive images lead to positive actions.
    
5. The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures.
    
6. Nearly everything society has considered a social advance (women's suffrage, full employment, universal education) has been prefigured first in some utopian writing.
    
7. We can create our own future-determining imagery (golf, bowling).
    
8. Implications for societies and organizations: Societies and organizations need less fixing, less problem solving and more positive images born of appreciation.
    
9. The appreciative eye -- as Churchill had -- apprehends "what is" rather than "what is not."
    
10. Appreciation not only draws our eye toward life, but stirs our feelings, excites our curiosity, and provides inspiration to the envisioning mind.
     
11. Our objective is to nourish the appreciative soil. Creating the conditions for appreciation -- in and around the organization -- is the single most important act that an organization can engage in if its real aim is to bring to fruition a new and better future.
     

Adapted by Jim Lord