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This paper aims to report the process and results of strategic level renewal of an organization from two perspectives: a senior leader from within and an independent process consultant engaged to facilitate the organization's process. The organization is an active, not monastic, international congregation of Roman Catholic religious sisters.

The congregation has carried out a review of direction approximately every six years of its 164 year history. The 2010 review took a whole systems approach to increase active involvement of every single member and to address external and internal organizational challenges including diminishing resources in two provinces and growing and complex needs.

The paper concludes that the process met most of the needs of the organization in addressing global issues of change and gained commitment from its members to make major changes in its strategic and operational decision making. One part of the paper describes and reflects in depth on the experience and meaning of the series of events and interventions in the organization's systems.

It is suggested that leaders can learn much from case studies arising from well outside their normal fields. This is because creativity and innovation is stimulated when encountering difference and leaders' and organizations' values can be strengthened through questioning and refinement.

This is an original analysis combining practical spirituality in an historical context, and complexity theory and development practice as applied to an organization to meet precise needs at a specific time.

The market for insuring insect damage is far from complete. This study introduces a new type of derivative instrument‐insect derivatives‐that provide growers a market‐based means of transferring insect risk to speculators or others who may profit from higher insect populations. A risk‐neutral valuation model is developed and applied to Bemisia tabaci population data. Economic simulation models show how insect derivatives can improve risk‐return results for a representative cotton farm in the Imperial Valley of California. The results suggest that insect derivatives may become important risk management tools for a wide range of growers.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the operation of a review into service user involvement within mental health services, which was led by service users using appreciative enquiry (AE).

The paper gives a descriptive account of the operation of the project and highlights the barriers to its success and how these were addressed. The project itself used AE methods to overcome some of the challenges to engaging service users around improvement activity. The approach was different to the conventional application of AE as people were engaged individually through interviews and their views generalised collectively by the service user team conducting the interviews.

The project findings are reported through considering the recommendations made as a result of the work but the wider aims of challenging power relationships and developing service user leadership are also discussed.

The paper suggests that replicating and developing the use of AE driven by service users is a positive tool in empowering recipients of mental health services.

The author suggests that this method could be a valuable tool in meeting the current UK Government policy of empowering local communities to take greater control of public service provision.

This project is an example of enabling leadership to arise from the grassroots of an organisation, turning the conventional concept of leadership on its head and challenges senior staff as to who might know best about how to improve services. It represents a novel approach to taking forward the empowerment agenda widely supported in Western democracies.