6
Appreciative Inquiry
Recently I was invited to help an organization undergoing change. I was asked to come in and work with the front line staff, who were seen as being in need of some support. By the time I got to meet them they were at that difficult point in the change programme where they had put in their applications for a job in the new structure (or alternatively for voluntary redundancy) but didn’t yet know the outcome.
It was agreed that I would run a three-hour session focused on “making sense of the changes.” Attendance would be voluntary. It attracted about eight people the first time it ran, one of whom appeared close to tears when we started the session. It was clear that it was an emotional time for people. After some scene-setting and so on, I structured the session around three questions: “What will be different?” “How will it impact our work?” and “How can I positively affect my own experience and that of those around me?”
The initial discussions provoked a lot of expressions of dissatisfaction and blame. It became apparent that the work environment was being experienced as highly negative. As is not uncommon in these situations, the managers were being held to account for a lot of the difficulties staff were suffering. The general story was that the managers “aren’t telling us anything,” and “are too busy,” and “aren’t doing this change well.” There wasn’t a lot of respect evident for their managers in the initial conversations. While I was fielding the morass of negative experiences unleashed by the first question, and wondering if I would be able to move the group on to a more productive conversation in the time available, I asked something like, “Has the whole change experience been like this, or is this a more recent situation that you are describing?” Questions like this are designed to produce an awareness of the variation in the experience. Once we have established that there has been a variation, we can focus on exploring the “better” experience to see what that tells us about the best of the past. From there we can move on to consider how things, from experience, could potentially be in the future. At the point that I asked this question it had little impact, and the conversation continued to be directed at people who weren’t present, and focused on discussing things the people present couldn’t change. I highlighted this, and suggested that they had choices about how we spent our time together and what we spent the time doing. I was attempting to shift their focus from who wasn’t there and what they couldn’t change (what had happened in the past) to who was there and what they could influence (in the present and the future). I also suggested that they had choices about the sense they chose to make of what was happening.
At some later point in our conversation one of the participants said something like, “It wasn’t like this when it (the change process) started.” This comment may have been elicited by my earlier question, or it may have arisen quite independently. Either way, “it wasn’t like this when it started” was the comment I’d been listening for. It was an invitation to explore a positive difference. So I asked, “What was it like when it started?” which elicited the information that it had originally been very consultative. My next question was, “So what’s changed recently?” Part of the answer was that a project manager had been appointed and there seemed to be more activity directed exclusively at the management group.
Considering this, we were able to construct some alternative accounts of what was going on, such as: the managers were bound by some confidentiality edict; they were out of their depth themselves with this change and were floundering; they didn’t know how people were feeling because no one had told them; they were assuming that if they couldn’t give good news, they had nothing to share; or they were very upwardly focused at present, perhaps worried about their own futures. As people began to engage with these alternative ways of making sense of what was going on, so different possibilities for action emerged.
The focus of the discussion started to move away from creating accounts of the bad behaviour of individual managers into creating a story of the changing context. In doing this they were able to gain some perspective on what might have been going on for the managers recently. Remembering that it hasn’t always been like this also creates hope that it can get better. Once a group starts to feel a bit hopeful, things can start to move along. We started to move from a stuck position of it’s awful because these people are awful and there’s is nothing we can do about that, to it’s awful because we are all caught up in this difficult situation which is affecting our relationships and our behaviour. Moving from personality attributions of behaviour to circumstantial attributions of behaviour creates more room for choice and change. It allows for different emotional relationships to surface, making room perhaps for sympathy and empathy that act to displace blame and anger. The stories we tell about people affects how we feel towards them, which in turn affects our behaviour around them. Feeling differently about other people allows us to make different attributions about them and to behave differently towards them.
The mood in the room shifted, people started to believe that they could proactively affect the situation. They could move from being helpless victims of the behaviour of others to being proactive members of the organization who had a responsibility to help make this change as good an experience as possible, even in these difficult circumstances. A quick reflective round at the end revealed that, compared to when they walked in, they were now feeling more positive, more accepting, more assertive, more proactive, and braver. They also felt they had more choice about what they could do.
And these feelings were translating into action intentions; they were motivated to do different things when they left. One had decided that he was going to set up a meeting with his manager to attempt to explain the situation from the team’s point of view. He wanted to do this in a way that was careful not to accuse the manager of any wrongdoing; rather he wanted to see if they could negotiate a different way of communicating going forward. Another had decided that she wasn’t going to amplify other people’s tales of woe, leading to a downward spiral of helplessness; rather she was going to challenge them about what they could do to make things better.
By acknowledging people’s current reality while redirecting their attention away from the things they couldn’t change (but could companionably grumble about together) towards those that they could directly influence, we were able to effect helpful change through the power of question and consistent attention redirection.
Introduction
Appreciative Inquiry has many technical descriptions: it is a dialogic organizational development change process (Bushe & Marshak, 2015a), or a collaborative transformation methodology (Sanchez, 2010), or a large group process, but however you describe it, it was one of the first of the co-creative change methodologies to be fully articulated. A deceptively simple process in my experience, it is highly adaptable, flexible, and robust in its application and effects. However, like the three other methodologies explained in later chapters, it needs to be conducted from a co-creative rather than a top-down mindset to be most effective (Bushe & Marshak, 2015a). Indeed, Bushe and Marshak argue that only when applied from a co-creative, or dialogic, mindset can it be transformational in its effect (2015a).
Process
The first articulation of Appreciative Inquiry was as a 5D model (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2001) (see Figure 6.1). The 5D model invites participants first to define an appreciative topic, then to discover the best examples of that topic in present and past experience, then to dream the best of what can be based on the discovery of the best of what has been, then to design the organization in the light of the future possibilities, and finally to experience their destiny as the future unfolds. This unfolding is based both on their internal reorientation experienced as being part of the process, and on active plans made as the result of the process.
Figure 6.1 The 5D model.
Source: Derived from Cooperrider and Whitney (2001, p.9)
In its original form, Appreciative Inquiry is experienced as a workshop event following the sequence above, but it is very versatile and the process can be experienced over time, in parallel process groups, or indeed as a coaching or team intervention. Appreciative Inquiry is an approach to, and a philosophy of, change as much as it is a defined process. There is much free information on the web, and there are many books now available about Appreciative Inquiry. While I recommend my own, Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management (Lewis, Passmore, & Cantore, 2007), I also recommend The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry (Hammond, 1996) and Appreciative Inquiry: Change at the Speed of Imagination (Watkins & Mohr, 2001), as well as, of course, David Cooperrider’s books.
Purpose
The purpose of Appreciative Inquiry is to allow the organizational members to co-create a way forward for themselves and their organization that springs from a deep knowledge of the heart of their success and their resourcefulness; and to co-create contextualized aspirations for future success.
Recommended Use
Appreciative Inquiry is very scalable and can be used with individuals and teams as well as whole organizations. It is particularly recommended when there is a need to inject some positivity and hope into a situation. Like the other methodologies mentioned here, it is helpful when the challenge or opportunity is a system-wide issue; when the collective intelligence of the whole organization is needed to address the challenge or opportunity; when the way forward is unclear and needs to be created; when the system needs to boost its confidence about its ability to engage with the challenge; and finally, it is particularly valuable when there is no obvious push for change or, as organizational members may put it, when there is no burning platform. Rather than trying to create one, Appreciative Inquiry works instead to create a compelling future.
Key Ideas
1. Focusing on what is working will solve the problem
Appreciative Inquiry isn’t about ignoring the problem, it’s about approaching it from a different direction, or it’s about talking about the same thing in a different way. “Every problem is the expression of a frustrated dream” strongly illuminates the idea that when we say we have a problem we are in some way comparing the current state to some other, better state, and we are aware of a shortfall. The idea of the other state is present in our expression of dissatisfaction with the current state. Equally, in talking about the other state, the “could be” state, we are also talking about our dissatisfaction with the present state. So to talk about the desired state is to talk about the problem, just in a way that is different from usual.
We can come at the apparent paradox central to Appreciative Inquiry, that it is possible to affect what isn’t working by focusing on what is, from another direction by seeing it as using pull factors rather than push factors to achieve change. All the things that are wrong in our current situation act as push factors for change. We are pushed into action to relieve ourselves of unpleasant emotions, situations, results, relationships, and so on. Once we obtain sufficient relief from the unpleasantness, we may well stop attending to the issue. Thus resolution is a state of minimal non-dissatisfaction. This is unlikely to be the maximal satisfaction state; rather it is the minimal tolerable state. Desirable future states act as pull factors for change. The motivation excited by them is of a different order. Accessing this motivation requires a different process. There is no limit on what can be aspired to except our ability to imagine. There isn’t the self-limiting stop signal that there is with push change.
2. The motivating power of the positive core
The concept of the positive core is that at the heart of any organization, team, or individual is a set of positive values and beliefs that are key to enabling the person, group, or organization to achieve goals, do things, and generally make a difference. The positive core is that aspect of our lives that can make us feel good about ourselves, our organization, our ambition, and our daily behaviour.
The difficulty is that the positive core becomes obscured from view by the requirements of daily life. So for individuals, the busyness, the “must do” lists, the anxiety and stress can layer over the positive core of motivation and ambition to the extent that life becomes a round of endless drudgery of lists, tasks, and duties. Similarly, in organizations and teams the requirements of production, the effects of organizational hierarchies, and the functional divisions can obscure the positive core of the organization from immediate view.
One of the aims of an appreciative approach is to reveal this positive core. If you just ask people, “What’s at the heart of this organization?” they can’t always access an answer just like that. Appreciative Inquiry processes bring answers into the light in a less direct way by asking appreciative questions and generating stories. The stories people tell in response to appreciative questions about highlight moments or sources of pride are laden with information about what is important to them, and about what they value about themselves, their work, or their colleagues. Listening to the passion in the stories, it becomes very easy to understand what makes up the positive core of the individual, group, or organization.
3. The transformational power of generativity
We have Gervase Bushe to thank for alerting us to the key importance of generativity to the effectiveness of Appreciative Inquiry (2007). Generativity refers to the phenomenon of something new occurring during the Appreciative Inquiry intervention. “A generative image is a combination of words, pictures, or other symbolic media that provide new ways of thinking about social and organizational reality” (Bushe & Marshak, 2015a, p. 23). Bushe is particularly keen on the role of metaphors. When the group comes up with a metaphor that encapsulates how they understand themselves or how they see their future selves, this can be a sign of something generative taking place.
For myself, I notice it as a qualitative shift in the group dynamic. Very often this shift is signalled by the fact that the group members are now talking directly to each other rather than through me. But sometimes it’s a subtler shift; an awareness that people are saying new things to each other, or maybe a change in the feel and atmosphere of the group. Appreciative Inquiry is all about creating newness in the moment, creating change in the moment. We are very much socialized to think of change as occurring after an event, but actually significant change can occur as a group comes to understand itself differently. Appreciative Inquiry is a form of organizational learning. Gervase’s definition suggests that “organizational learning … revolves around two or more people inquiring into their experience and generating new knowledge that leads to a change in their patterns of organizing” (Bushe, 2010, p. 49).
4. The principles underpinning Appreciative Inquiry
Ten principles underpin Appreciative Inquiry theory and practice (see Box 6.1). They are an expression of the social constructionist philosophical base and the dialogic organizational development practice base. In addition, they bring an emphasis to the importance of intervening at a system level to achieve sustainable change.
Critical Success Factors
1. Event preparation
Over the years working with organizations using these collaborative transformational methodologies, I have come to realize that preparation is key to producing an impactful, effective, and sustainable change, especially if you only have a one-day event opportunity with the group.
a) A planning group
As with any development event, preparatory work is necessary. It is best, if possible, to work with a small group that is representative of the system that will be present at the event. This group, while working with you to create the event, becomes versed in the philosophy of Appreciative Inquiry and understands how the event will run. This means that on the day there are some people embedded in the group to help support the event. They can also act as ambassadors beforehand as they become excited about the possibilities of the event. Make no mistake, working with the planning group is part of the intervention. How you work with them needs to be in concordance with the event philosophy and approach, that is, you need to be working with them in accordance with the appreciative principles.
For instance, sometimes it proves impossible to negotiate as much time for working with the planning group as you think desirable, or you can’t get exactly the people you would like, or people have to miss some of the meetings, or they arrive late and leave early. As frustrating as this can be, always bear in mind the key principles. For instance, focus on what you can do, not what you can’t; be appreciative of the people who are there, not focused on those who aren’t; and remember that change is an iterative rather than a linear process.
b) Topic choice
One of the most important tasks of this group is to determine the topic of inquiry. Essentially, this will be what they want more of rather than what they want less of. And the one isn’t necessarily the opposite of the other. Work with the planning group to inquire into what they want to grow more of in their team or organization (e.g., more effective team work, more innovation, or better interdepartmental connections). Help them think about the discovery questions that will help people access the best of the past experience in the organization in this area. It’s helpful to “trial” these questions with the planning team, both for their experience, and to get a sense of what organizational experiences or memories these questions might access.
c) Addressing the “what ifs”
Another thing the planning team is useful for is running “what if” scenarios. As you explain the Appreciative Inquiry process this is likely to happen anyway as people inquire into the process and begin to explore how it might play out. Typical questions in my experience include variations on: “What if people don’t have any good experiences?”; “Our people are very intellectual, I’m not sure they are going to take well to the idea of ‘dreaming’ or playing with Lego …”; or “What if no one volunteers to do anything at the end?”
I addressed a number of these challenges to negotiating to work in an Appreciative Inquiry way in an earlier book (Lewis, Passmore, & Cantore, 2007). At one time I considered these “what ifs” and “yes buts” to be expressions of concern, doubt, or anxiety. I have since developed a more appreciative frame and see them as questions that offer an excellent “road testing” service to the ideas we, as the planning group, are developing of how to proceed. People’s questions of this nature are based on a concern that the event should be successful, that their credibility should be enhanced rather than harmed, and that their colleagues should not be embarrassed. These are good motivations. Seeing such questions as gifts that create the opportunity to acknowledge that there is a risk inherent in proceeding in this way allows me to engage with them in a more authentic and positive way. While I will offer the reassurance of my experience in running these events, I can also say, “Yes, that is a risk we run. We’ll do everything we can, in planning the design and in how we invite people, to militate against such disasters, but in the end people are free to choose whether to engage fully or not. One of our jobs is to create an event that is inviting, enticing, and exciting, that also looks as if it might actually make a difference and will be psychologically safe enough that people feel they can take risks of contribution, but there are no guarantees.” I have a short video about working with sceptics on my YouTube channel (Lewis, 2015).
2. Who to invite
The invitees to the event need to be the people who make up the system. Deciding who is part of the system tends to be an iterative process that unfolds as you increasingly refine what the intervention hopes to achieve. It is remarkable how many people hope to resolve issues or improve working patterns or relationships with other groups but see no need to include them in the event. As Bushe so succinctly puts it, “Partnership with the problem people can’t be rebuilt if they are not part of the conversation” (Bushe, 2010, p. 55). I have had a university request to work on the student experience without including any students; a finance department who wanted to work differently with other parts of the organization without including them in the process redesign event; and an IT team who wanted to improve relationships with outside contract project managers without including them. This experience is not uncommon. Sometimes it is possible to negotiate to include the excluded. The next best thing is to find some way to bring their voice into the proceedings. These experiences just emphasize that a key part of the pre-event negotiation is deciding who is the system defined by the topic, and the success criteria, and therefore who should be invited. An early opportunity to influence these factors is to be treasured. Weisbord and Janoff came up with an acronym to help us decide who the system is in any particular context, ARE IN (see Box 6.2) (2007).
3. Voluntarism
It really helps to negotiate voluntary attendance at Appreciative Inquiry events, and indeed all the co-creative events. It is not always possible but the voluntary principle adds to the potential power of Appreciative Inquiry events in a number of ways.
a) Voluntary attendance
Ideally, people are invited to attend the Appreciative Inquiry event. The event topic, the nature of the event, and the invitation have to be sufficiently compelling that people prioritize being there of their own volition. When people make an active choice to invest their time in the event, they are keen to get a good return on that investment. When they are compelled to be there by management diktat, it can be a recipe for frustration, and even sabotage of the process. The necessity of securing voluntary attendance immediately focuses organizational attention on making the event relevant and compelling to all.
b) Voluntary participation
The voluntarism principle needs to extend to participation in any and every particular activity or discussion that is planned for the day. We never know what may be going on in people’s lives to make some topic of discussion unbearable. They may need, during the day, to prioritize their own need for some quiet time, or to make a timely phone call. It is my experience that when people are treated as adults, constantly juggling competing priorities, trying to make good moment-to-moment decisions in complex contexts, they manage it very well, and with minimum disruption to the process.
c) Voluntary contribution
Calling on collective intelligence is a key feature of large group processes. However, people are free to choose whether and what to contribute; so the event needs to create an atmosphere where people feel safe and trusting, and so desire to share information and dreams and to build connection and intimacy.
With most Appreciative Inquiry-based events there is a shift at some point from a focus on the process in the day to a focus on actions in the future. Often this involves forming project or work groups to progress activity. And the groups need members. Again, group membership needs to be voluntary. The desire to contribute to changing things for the future needs to stem from the motivation and community built during the day. Forcing everyone to sign up to a post-event group activity regardless of their energy, time, or passion for the topic or project just creates drag, and sometimes derails the whole process.
The ideal outcome of an Appreciative Inquiry event is that everyone is so affected by the event process, discussions, and aspirations that they are motivated to make small changes in their own behaviour on a day-to-day basis that will aggregate to a bigger shift, and even transformation within the organization as a whole. In addition, they may volunteer to be part of specific groups working on specific projects. By definition, these personal shifts in behaviour and the group project activity are above and beyond their job description: it is voluntary, discretionary behaviour. Bushe expresses this well when he says, “few arrive wanting more work, few leave without having volunteered for co-operative action” (Bushe & Fry, 2012).
Key Skills
Appreciative Inquiry’s effectiveness is predicated on a few key skills. These skills in themselves are familiar facilitator skills, but with a different twist.
1. Crafting appreciative questions
Questions are used by facilitators, and people in general, to different ends. Schein, in his recent book Humble Inquiry (2013), for example, notes diagnostic inquiry, confrontational inquiry, and process-oriented inquiry. Diagnostic inquiry is focused on finding out, while confrontational inquiry covers assertions disguised as questions, and process inquiry inquires into process. These questioning approaches are all based broadly on the belief that there is a reality to be uncovered by careful questioning. In this sense they are part of the diagnostic organizational development practice (Bushe & Marshak, 2015a).
Appreciative Inquiry questions, on the other hand, are designed not so much to encourage articulation of known accounts or beliefs as to create previously unheard accounts or beliefs. Appreciative questioning works to bring new accounts into the present conversation. Each time we ask an appreciative question we are hoping to hear something that hasn’t been articulated before. In addition to creating new possibilities through the creation of new accounts, appreciative questioning is very focused on creating positive energy for change, and positive possibilities for the future. At which point it is necessary to reiterate that Appreciative Inquiry is not an approach that “doesn’t allow us to talk about the negative things, or to express negative feelings”; on the contrary, as explained above, it is very focused on making things better, it just goes about it in a different way. Appreciative questioning is the social constructionist principle in action. How we talk about the world creates the world. Box 6.3 illuminates the characteristics of good Appreciative Inquiry questions.
2. Listening and looking for the positive
One skill an appreciative practitioner needs is an ability to hear the positive, or potential positive, in talk, discussion, and conversation, and indeed an ability to turn the conversation in a more positive direction if needed. The importance and the impact of doing this is illustrated in the case study that opened this chapter, where the remark “it wasn’t always this bad” created the opportunity to move the group from talking about what was wrong now (a deficit conversation to which the group was initially very strongly wedded) to what was right in the past (a discovery conversation). From here the conversation could move on to what could be better in the future (a dream conversation), and then on to what people needed to be doing differently to make something different happen (a design conversation), and finally they could resolve to take specific actions to positively affect the future (destiny).
3. Using stories to make sense
Appreciative Inquiry is a social constructionist-based approach; it recognizes that together people co-create their social realities. They do this through their patterns of talk and interaction. This means that to change people’s perceptions of themselves or their situation, or their colleagues, is to change reality. The stories we tell about our reality create our reality. Story creation is an aspect of sense-making. Sense-making is the human endeavour to make sense of what is going on around us, particularly what is affecting us. In the absence of information, we form our own hypothesis of what is going on and then find the confirming evidence. Bushe says that the sense-making process “is endemic to human relations. It cannot be stopped,” (Bushe, 2010, p. 22) so better to work with it than either to ignore it or to squash it.
In the case study that opened this chapter we first identified the stories people were constructing to make sense of the situation in which they found themselves, and then created other possible accounts of what was happening that could also explain the situation. Working like this to increase the pool of sense-making stories from which people could choose, we also expanded the pool of possible reactions they could have to the situation. Making sense of a situation differently allows us to engage with it differently. In other words, it creates the potential for change.
4. Noticing shifts
One of the arts of being an appreciative practitioner is noticing when significant shifts occur in a group’s dynamic, and then being able to capitalize on that for the benefit of the group. Such shifts can be indicated by a small positive comment. For example, maybe the group is working itself down into a negative spiral and your efforts to flip or switch the conversation to positive talk don’t seem to be taking, but then unexpectedly one of the members echoes something you said earlier, or answers a question you asked a while ago, and the possibility of creating a conversational shift presents itself, as in our case study example.
A shift can also be indicated by a change in the quality of the interaction. One that I notice frequently with teams is the point at which they stop talking “through me,” as it were, and start really talking to each other. At this point we have shifted from “report talk,” reporting to me, to something more generative. As this progresses and the group talks to itself more, the group heart or identity begins to form in the middle of the circle of chairs. It is a fantastic shift to observe. It was articulated by one leader who, at the end of a team development day in response to the “what’s changed today?” question, said, “I no longer feel alone.” She had arrived feeling she carried all the burden of leadership. Her senior team was more a coordinating group than a team. Facing the challenge of leading significant change she needed to move her senior managers towards being her leadership team. Over the course of the day, as connections were made, relationships strengthened, and joint aspirations created, the feel of the room shifted. The only way I can describe it is to say that where there had once been an empty space between people, there was now a connected space buzzing with life. For the team leader, as she expressed it above, the feeling was of now being one of many rather than just one in charge of many.
Other shifts are things like growing excitement, the emergence of hope or optimism, and the emergence of good possible futures. One of the arts of being an appreciative practitioner is being sufficiently connected to the group and “of the moment” to experience and notice these moments, while simultaneously having a sufficiently detached sense of what achievement, growth, and forward movement look like to be able to help the group work with such shift moments to achieve further growth.
Origins of the Methodology
As a postgraduate, David Cooperrider (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987) experimented with focusing his organizational development activities on what was working in an organization as well as, or indeed instead of, what wasn’t. He discovered that by just focusing people’s attention on what was working he could induce positive change in an organization. In other words, he realized that organizational growth and development could be stimulated by an inquiry into things other than “the problem.” Indeed, change could be induced by specifically focusing on things that very definitely weren’t the problem.
It is hard to appreciate now just how counter-intuitive this must have seemed at the time. It was obvious that if you had an organizational problem then to solve it you would need to focus on “the problem.” It stood to reason. It still does. It is still sounds counter-intuitive when you say to people, “In order to address this problem, challenge, or issue, we are going to focus on something else; we are going to enquire into things that are not the problem.” For many people, their willingness to engage with Appreciative Inquiry as an approach runs onto the sands right there. For guidance on how to avoid this and other such sandbanks of counter-intuitiveness when introducing Appreciative Inquiry into an organization, see Chapter 10, “How to introduce Appreciative Inquiry and related approaches to your organization,” of my book Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management (Lewis et al., 2007).
When to Use and Counter-indications
1. Leaders wedded to command and control
There can be many reasons why a leader might not be ready for this kind of intervention. The most obvious is that the leader is wedded to the command and control model of leadership and feels it incumbent upon them to come up with all the answers. While these beliefs can of course be worked with, it may not be possible to create enough of a shift in time for the event. If the leader is not ready or able to effectively call on, activate, and work with the skills, strengths, and energy of the group then you are probably wasting everyone’s time by going ahead with the event. There is also a danger that you will queer the pitch for those who come after you hoping to work in this way.
2. The timing isn’t right
To get the best from an Appreciative Inquiry process there needs to be an investment of time and energy into the process, including after the event. Ideally, an organization is ready for the energy unleashed by an Appreciative Inquiry and has the space to really work with the outcomes to get the benefit. Reviewing some research on the effectiveness of Appreciative Inquiry summits, Stellnberger concludes that, “An organization needs to be ready for the summit and ready for what comes afterwards” (2011, p. 98).
3. Change is seen as event not process
What happens after the event in terms of supporting the unfolding of activity is as important as what happens at the event; organizational change is a process, Appreciative Inquiry is a process. Both regularly get recast as one-off events. Organizations get most benefit from Appreciative Inquiry when they understand it as an iterative process, as a cultural way of being. At the very least they need to understand that the summit or group event is not the total Appreciative Inquiry experience, it is only the most visible part. What happens before and what happens afterwards are equally important parts of the change process.
4. Wrong topic
Be wary of being asked to focus on a smokescreen topic. I can possibly best illustrate this with an example. I was asked by an organization to come and do some “Appreciative Inquiry training.” I’ve learnt from experience that the best way to introduce Appreciative Inquiry to an organization is to do an Appreciative Inquiry. In this way one can explain the theory as the event unfolds, as if revealing the software, or offering a meta-level of theory to complement the practice level of experience. They agreed that sounded like a good way to proceed, so we sought for a topic.
A voluntary, charitable, mission-based organization, they decided they wanted to work on fundraising. Essentially, they wanted the organization to make the shift from just having a specialized team of fundraisers, to having a specialized team of fundraisers and a staff group who recognized the importance of fundraising and embraced it as a key part of their role. At present the slightly unpleasant task of asking for money was hived off to a special team and everyone else carried on with their daily work untainted by such pecuniary considerations. I exaggerate for clarity; however, it was clear that this difficult yet key task was split off from much of the organizational consciousness.
This sounded like an interesting topic. I could see that the story held by many in the organization about the unpleasantness of the necessity of asking for money needed to shift. Rather than “doing good” and “asking for money” being two oppositional aspects of the work, they needed to become much more clearly connected as part of the larger ambition of achieving the organization’s mission. I thought we could possibly achieve this through the co-creation of new stories where raising money was, in itself, doing good. It seemed an interesting challenge for an Appreciative Inquiry event.
As the planning group worked together, some of the recent history of the organization emerged, particularly that there had been a round of redundancies a short while before, and that it was possible there would be more. This experience had created some strong feelings, as for some such behaviour was in contradiction of the organization’s mission. Others objected to how it was done. Some of the people in the planning group were working out very long notice periods. It also seemed there was another split in the organization, between the public conversation of “one big family” and a reality of people being treated differently. As we proceeded to try to plan this event, more organizational splits emerged until it became apparent, to me, that what the organization really needed to be focusing on was some internal healing, before it tried to address this operational issue. It seemed to me it needed to create some coherence about the past. It needed to co-create an account of how the organization could both be a good organization and have to do these difficult things.
In due course it became apparent that there was a key (unacknowledged) split in the leadership team. It was impossible to talk about this split because that involved acknowledging negative emotions about each other, and to acknowledge such realities would mean that as people they fell short of their ideals. However, it also became very apparent that if this leadership split wasn’t addressed before the event, there was a clear danger that it would explode in the middle of the event, with an audience of the whole staff team. I didn’t think it responsible to let this happen. From an ethical perspective one of my roles is to try to create and promote psychologically safe places for people to work together. Therefore I requested that I be granted a session with just the leadership team, together, before we ran this event. Although agreed in principle, the mere idea of having to be in the same room together (it transpired that they hadn’t actually worked together for some time) focusing on themselves was enough to produce change in the system, with two members becoming proactive about leaving the organization.
In the end, neither of these planned events happened: I didn’t get to run a session with the leadership team; neither did I get to run an event, either a healing-focused event or a fundraising-focused event, with the whole organization. It was a very challenging engagement. However, I offer it here as an example of the potential danger of focusing on a less central topic rather than the one that is actually affecting the whole system.
Conclusion
Appreciative Inquiry is a highly effective, well road tested, and highly versatile process for achieving change at individual, team, and organizational levels. While, with its emphasis on the importance of positivity, it is probably most obviously the “operational arm” of organizational positive psychology, the other methodologies explored in the next few chapters can all be delivered from a positive and appreciative perspective.