What a difference a week makes. As I write this on March 13, 2020 (Friday the 13th) I must reflect on COVID-19 pandemic that swept out of China in January and has touched every part of the world, and now every part of our lives. Classes and face to face meetings have been suspended, the NCAA tournament canceled, PGA golf canceled, churches open only online, and the list goes on. So as we worry about our personal safety and the safety of our families, we have to contend with how to hunker down for a month or two and continue to do our work. This new normal for our work and home lives will likely be in place for months, not weeks.

But despite the danger posed by this novel coronavirus and the unsettled lives we will lead for a while, we must remain positive. Assured that 1) our families, our university, and our country will certainly get through this crisis, and 2) that if we keep our heads and remain calm and thoughtful about our decisions in the coming weeks, we may well discover better ways to get things done…because we have to.

In our roles as educators, we need to ensure that our students and residents continue to learn. As clinical faculty, researchers and administrators, we need to reconsider how patients get cared for, how we get academic and administrative work done when in-person meetings pose some risk and violate the recommendation of social distancing. The great news is we have access to technical solutions for some of these challenges. Many of these technologies have already had some limited use in our system. Now is where the process of appreciative inquiry comes into play.

Appreciative inquiry is a process that looks for what works in an organization, asking you to examine success rather than identifying the problem and working on solutions to fix it. Instead, appreciative inquiry challenges our assumptions, the set of beliefs around how work is to be done. There will always be the need to do some of our work in person…it is hard to pull a tooth, do a spinal tap, take out an appendix, perform lab experiments, or tend to ICU patients without being there in person. But in our current situation with COVID-19, do we still need to have routine in-person meetings at school or in the hospital? Or, do you need to be at the office to get work done? This crisis provides us with an opportunity, albeit one forced upon us, to rethink how we do work in an academic medical center environment. Appreciative inquiry offers a process for rethinking how we work in four steps:

1. surface and value the best of "what is" 
2. envision "what might be"
3. dialogue about "what should be", and finally
4. innovate to define "what will be"

As I arrived at work this morning, I was faced with a set of decisions about upcoming in-person faculty development sessions that are scheduled for the next few weeks. Should they be canceled or postponed? What about the approaching reading circles, the workshop in late March? What do we do with the three-hour in-person leadership session (LIAM session #7) that Dr. Bendapudi is scheduled to attend?...and the list goes on.

Here is how we used appreciative inquiry to begin to sort through these decisions.

1. Surfacing the best of "what is":

• We knew about the IT resource of BlueJeans (which is available in the School of Medicine) that is provided to do virtual teaching but have limited experience with it for small person-to-person meetings.
• We quickly learned about Blackboard Collaborate Ultra that allows for great synchronous, virtual classroom-based teaching. After an easy set-up, we conducted a test to be able to understand how it works. We quickly realized Collaborate Ultra would enable us to have active learning sessions with a larger group.
• We all have access to the Microsoft suite of applications, and Teams is a fantastic alternative to face-to-face meetings for a group to interact regarding the routine job of getting business done. You can "call" your colleague and have a virtual live chat, share files, and share your computer screen.

Without delay, we determined what is available to us right now. In short, these tools will allow us to keep up with existing faculty development commitments that usually would have been delivered in person.

2. Envisioning "what might be":

• We promptly sat down and made a list of all the things we could do virtually that had been done in person previously.
• We identified other parts of our work that could be converted from in-person to virtual and actually might be better.

• We could immediately connect how the use of virtual tools would extend our reach across the HSC campus, and the recording function in many of these software packages would allow asynchronous viewing as well. We would have never had this discussion had COVID-19 not come crashing down into our world. Increasing our virtual presence is something we should do.

• Next week we will take what we have learned about these existing tools and approaches already available to us and build out a plan for what will be faculty development as we continue our work using these technology-based tools. 

So what can you do in this crisis as you consider how to do your work for the next few weeks to months? I suggest you consider using an Appreciative Inquiry approach to surface what already exists in our system that you could adapt or adopt to do your work differently, going forward. It is a powerful tool that just might define a new way of doing things that will survive the current crisis and become the norm after the virus is gone. Consider getting the book The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry (Hammond, 2013) from Amazon now. It is a short read and will give you the tools you need to rethink how you can continue your work while making UofL a great place to work and learn.

Do you know of a technology tool we should share? Or have you implemented Appreciative Inquiry to redesign how you work with your colleagues? Let us know. Email us with AI in the subject line and tell us what you are doing.

Resource links have been provided for the technology tool we mention.

• For additional resources or help at the School of Medicine, see this file from the ATO team.
• For resources or help for Blackboard, contact the Delphi Center or for assistance moving a class to an online model contact Aimee Greene at aimee.greene@louisville.edu or 852-4482. 
• There are also additional resources from the University of Louisville Information Technology Services “Working Remotely” website