A Grant to Help Organizations SOAR

“We live in a world our conversations create.” — David Cooperrider.

It is the importance and value that conversations hold that is the key to understanding and practicing SOAR—a framework that allows individuals and organizations to grow by having conversations about Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, and Results to create strategy and strategic plans that inspire innovation and engagement—pathways forward! You can learn more on how to SOAR at www.soar-strategy.com.

The College of Business and Information Technology (CoBIT) Interim Dean Dr. Matthew Cole and Professor Dr. Jacqueline Stavros, along with Kathryn Wrench, executive director of sponsored research at Lawrence Tech, and Sandra Justice, director of the University of South Florida research development institute were recently awarded an 18-month, $76,818, grant from the National Science Foundation’s Growing Access for Nationally Transformative Equity and Diversity (GRANTED) program. The grant, titled “Strategically Engaging Private Institutions at Building Research Infrastructure, Networks, and Knowledge (BRINK) in the Emergence of Research,” will help fund seminars to assist smaller, private colleges in effectively securing grants. The grant will also help the 25 private, non-profit colleges and universities across the state that are members of Michigan Independent Colleges and Universities (MICU). The funds from the grant program will allow the college to do research and hold conferences. The grant will allow the college to study the efficacy of SOAR as a tool to help build strategic capacity and multi-stakeholder relationships and hold conferences to allow other universities and administrative leaders to share their findings. The first workshop will teach participants on how to apply SOAR at the level of self, their research teams, and departments.

According to Interim Dean Cole, “Our goal is to help smaller institutions be competitive and receive grants to advance programming and research. We want to train research administrators and research development staff to communicate effectively with the stakeholders at their institutions—with faculty and those outside of their institutions—to create strategies and build a strategic plan to increase research, bring unique approaches to grant writing, and develop other skills that may be valuable to their institutions.” Kathryn Wrench understands the challenges smaller institutions face when it comes to accessing grants and is engaged in helping to resolve this obstacle. “Through this grant, we anticipate being able to support about 100 people in training and mentoring [regarding] how to facilitate productive and meaningful conversations and foster strategic change that grows research. It's a large-scale training and mentoring project that aims to create sustainable administrative support in a network of institutions across Michigan,” Wrench states. Through the grant, CoBIT hopes to help provide research infrastructure support.

The first activity funded by the grant will be a BRINK conference at LTU in June 2024. Research administrators and development professionals will receive paid training opportunities and mentoring on how to engage stakeholders in strategic conversations when it comes to research development and planning. In 2025, the grant will fund another conference where institutions will hold proactive conversations on potential changes others can follow by sharing their best practices in building research capacity and any successful outcomes they had over the year. The results of the 2025 conference will become articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals to welcome additional administrations to follow the findings under the BRINK grant. Between the two conferences, there will be quarterly online follow-up mentoring and coaching sessions. The training will use the Appreciative Inquiry and SOAR (Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, and Results) techniques developed over the career of COBIT Professor Jacqueline Stavros. Stavros says, “over the last two decades, we have learned from our work and research with many throughout the world that conversations around strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results build trust and positive connections, create innovations, fuel productivity, inspire strategies and actions that generate positive change.” SOAR has helped individuals, teams, and entrepreneurs in for-profit, non-profit, government, and Fortune 500 organizations. Stavros says, “we have heard of SOAR applications on every continent except Antarctica, in a wide variety of industries from healthcare, education to automotive, hi-tech, retail, service, and manufacturing. We are excited to bring it to our research community in Michigan!"

Stavros and Cole have been studying SOAR for over 10 years with their doctoral and master students and brought SOAR into the CoBIT classrooms back in 2015. SOAR operating system is Appreciative Inquiry (AI), which focuses on the best of what is and could be in a team or organization and uses that to build future directions. If this is the first time you are learning about the humanistic AI, please visit the AI Commons to learn more: https://aicommons.champlain.edu/. SOAR integrates appreciative inquiry into strategic thinking, planning, and leading, inviting individuals of all levels within organizations to create strategic plans through shared conversations, collaborations, and a commitment to action.

SOAR leverages the strengths and opportunities from the classical analytical SWOT model and adds in the elements of aspirations and results. Weaknesses and threats are not ignored, they are reframed into opportunities to pursue. Stakeholders are invited into conversations about strengths (what the organization does well), opportunities (what the possibilities and innovations are), aspirations (what leads to purposeful work that reflects vision and wishes), and results (meaningful and measurable outcomes). Stavros adds, “SOAR-based conversations create a positive frame for strategic direction, plans, leadership, daily operations, and the well-being of an organization’s employees and the people it impacts.”

Through the BRINK grant, focused training workshops will be delivered on Learning to SOAR, and research will be conducted to study the efficacy of SOAR and its implications when it comes to strategizing and strategic planning. The grant will also assist other private and small public organizations in holding strategic conversations and obtaining funding and grants to allow them to progress forward.

by Nurzahan Rahman and Matthew Cole