This emphasis on internal customers has usually meant that managers first ask the managers of other departments about their “needs.” “What do you need in order to be successful?” “What don’t you have that my department can provide?” This approach to interdepartmental coordination begins with the assumption of deficit. What do I need to provide that someone else doesn’t have? This simple assumption lies at the heart of modern enterprise. Identify what people need and provide it to them—or create the need and then fill this need.
This deficit perspective is valid. Needs must still be identified and filled by successful managers. Nevertheless, an appreciative perspective may be of even greater value in the complex and unpredictable world of the 21st Century. In helping his client to create a successful organization, an appreciative consultant asks his client not only what other members of the organization need, but also what resources do these members already have that can benefit everyone in the organization. This is a key ingredient in any appreciative consulting strategy—and it is very much in alignment with Model Four consultation.
The effective manager does not confine herself to the needs of her department. She also identifies the resources that her department already possesses, so that they might be shared with other departments. This emphasis on resources that already exist, rather than on resources that are needed, lies at the heart of an appreciative assessment strategy, and in particular at the heart of the Human Resource Bank—a tool on which we focus in this essay and the next in this series.
The Nature and Purpose of Human Resource Banks
We set the context for understanding the nature and purpose of the human resource bank by returning once again to Hernando De Soto’s description of hidden capital in Third World countries. In analyzing the “mystery of capital,” Hernando De Soto (2000, p. 7) focusing on the process of conversion:
Solving [the mystery of capital] requires an understanding of why Westerners, by representing assets with titles, are able to see and draw out capital from them. One of the greatest challenges to the human mind is to comprehend and to gain access to those things we know exist but cannot see. . . . [O]nly the West has the conversion process required to transform the invisible to the visible.
