At last month’s OD Network 2010 Conference in New Orleans I ran a 100-minute workshop titled “Practitioners in Transition”, a repeat of a similar session I had run session at OD Network Conference 2009 in Seattle. From the program guide:

OD Practitioners in Transition - Are you an OD practitioner in transition? Are you considering joining the field, changing direction within the field, or leaving the field of Organizational Development? Join with other conference attendees at this “Birds of a Feather” session to share your journey, discover new paths, and find support.

So many of us are undergoing transitions this year, whether financial, career, home or health-related, whether chosen or un-chosen. When I face an un-chosen transition, or crossroad, my mind circles unhelpfully around two alluring thoughts: “woe is me!” and “what shall do?” These can always be relied upon to invoke my abundant self-pity, and indulgent analysis-paralysis. It’s important to acknowledge our capacity for self-pity and analysis-paralysis. They do sooth us in some way, to a point. But for this session, I wanted to create a different experience for attendees by adopting the assumption that we’ve already faced significant transitions (life’s lemons, as some suggested), and made the best possible lemonade from them. With this appreciative lens, I came up with the following five questions:

1. What crossroads do you find yourself at now?
2. How do you feel about it?
3. What (possibly competing) values do you wish to serve as you move forward?
4. What gifts have supported you through previous transitions?
5. How are you calling those gifts forward now?

We had fifteen attendees in the circle in New Orleans (more than last year), and I was blown away by the courage and conviction each attendee demonstrated, not only in the facts of their story, but in the showing up and telling of it. I’ve now run two groups through these questions, and the feedback from both suggests these can be effective at shifting a negative orientation to transition to a positive one. If you were in either group, please feel free to report back on your journey since our time together.

Feel free to re-use these questions in other groups,  for any transition you may find yourself facing.

And let us know how it goes.