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The high-risk/high-stress nature of hospital emergency departments has made handoffs (i.e. patient transfers across organizational units) an area of significant safety consequence, as evidenced by numerous studies and 2006 Comprehensive Accreditation Manual for Hospitals: The Official Handbook (CAMH). Joint Commission Resources, Inc.: Author; 2005. This same high-risk/high-stress environment is known for generating resistance to traditional deficit-based, external expert driven approaches to improvement. The authors describe how one hospital overcame this resistance by using an Appreciative Inquiry approach to the redesign of the information flow and organizational roles within a mission-critical area of the hospital. Rather than designing to ameliorate the root causes of ineffective handoffs, this positive lens approach (Appreciative Inquiry) was used to engage staff in identifying and expanding upon their most effective handoff experiences. Implications for shifting from problem-based design to a positive lens approach in the creation of micro-information systems and new organizational processes are discussed.

In this volume of Advances in Appreciative Inquiry, leading scholars from the fields of art, management, design, information technology, organization development, and education come together to chart new directions in Appreciative Inquiry theory and research as well as new intervention practices and opportunities for design in organizations. While diverse in topic and discipline, each of the following original chapters treats the reader to a view of Appreciative Inquiry's revolutionary way of approaching familiar questions of information and organization design and vice versa.