Drawing on a positive organizational scholarship (POS) approach, this paper presents findings from the first of a two-part study exploring user experiences of brilliant renal care within the Regional Dialysis Centre in Blacktown (RDC-B). A world café method was used engaging patients, carers, and staff in conversations about brilliance. Practitioners led the study, seeking to validate their claims that the RDC-B is an exemplar of brilliant care. Pragmatics dominated the fieldwork. Researchers and practitioners collaborated throughout the study, including hosting two world cafés. Key findings from the study are that the RDC-B is completely patient and relationally-centred, with high-quality connections, dedicated and competent staff providing a complete, responsive, and personalized service that is also like being in a family. Drawing on POS, we suggest that relational-centred care requires at the very least high-quality connections and relational coordination to build and sustain the levels of positivity identified in the RDC-B.

Following its positive outcomes in a state-wide survey, co-managers of the Queensland Cancer Control Analysis Team commissioned discovery interviews to explore these results. Eleven interviews were analysed by positive organisational scholars who drew on depreciating and appreciating organisational dynamics to make sense of Queensland Cancer Control Analysis Team’s high performance. An initial framework was devised, including appreciative, depreciative, and hybrid dynamics, with the latter representing an extension to an existing taxonomy. Findings revealed mainly appreciative and hybrid dynamics. To further understand these, the framework was expanded by reframing the dynamics as positive institutional work. This extension offers an experiential understanding of positive institutional patterns by incorporating the troika of experiential surfacing, agency as inquiry, and inclusion. The value of this framework is threefold, for it can be used as an analytic, a diagnostic, and an intervention tool to enable scholars and practitioners to operationalise positive organisational scholarship to examine, understand, and promote positive organisational experiences.