[Oe List ...] ORID—A “Life” Method

[Randy Williams]

Colleagues,

In her new book Who Do We Choose To Be: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity, Margaret Wheatley has her own articulation of ORID in four questions which she calls an After Action Review. They are:

O—What just happened?
R—Why do you think it happened?
I—What can we learn from this?
D—How will we apply these learnings?

We have always said that our methods are “life” methods,. Therefore, we didn’t create them, we discovered them. Each time I come across something like this from Wheatley it confirms that they are indeed “life” methods. 

I’ve seen other variations of ORID—for example from Peter Senge, in Catholic social theory, and even from my old professor of church history, Albert Outler. His articulation was, for me, the most memorable, in just three, not four,  short questions: What? So What? Now What?

As some of you who also sat with him will recall, Outler was not always so concise. 

Randy