Appreciative Inquiry is a collaborative and constructive inquiry process that searches for everything that gives life to organizations, communities, and larger human systems when they are most alive, effective, creative and healthy in their interconnected ecology of relationships. To appreciate, quite simply, means to value and to recognize that which has value—it is a way of knowing and valuing the best in life. In the language of Positive Organizational Scholarship it means a research focus—a positive bias—seeking fresh understanding of dynamics described by words like excellence, thriving, abundance, resilience, or exceptional and life-giving. In this context the word appreciate means to value those things of value—it is a mode of knowing often connected to the idea of esthetic appreciation in the arts. To appreciate also means to be grateful or thankful for—it is a way of being and maintaining a positive stance along the path of life's journey. And not incidentally, to appreciate is to increase in value too. Combining the three—appreciation as a way of knowing, as a way of being and as an increase in value– suggests that Appreciative Inquiry is simultaneously a life-centric form of study and a constructive mode of practice. As a form of study, Appreciative Inquiry focuses on searching systematically for those capacities and processes that give life and strength and possibility to a living system; and as a constructive mode of practice, it aims at designing and crafting human organizations through a process in which valuing and creating are viewed as one, and where inquiry and change are powerfully related and understood as a seamless and integral whole Leading Positive Change through Appreciative Inquiry is a course dedicated to advancing our understanding and skill in leading strength-based change and on how to create, foster and manage organizations in which people thrive and perform at their best.
Watch: It Starts with Topic Choice
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En provenance du cours de Case Western Reserve University
Leading Positive Change through Appreciative Inquiry
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À partir de la leçon
Week 5
Week Five discusses Topic Choice – or the reframing of problems into affirmative opportunities – as the starting point for AI interventions. A case study of a trucking company is presented, including video, to show how an organization moves from Topic Choice through the Ai 4-D Cycle to launch and sustain positive changes that lead to improved profitability and a transformed union-management culture.
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Ronald FryProfessor
Organizational Behavior
[MUSIC]
So in this session we want to come back to stories and
examples of the appreciative inquiry method in action.
So I want to come back to our diagram that we've seen before.
This is the depiction of the change process.
The different stages that you would take another coworker,
a coworker group, a team, a department, that you would take that group through.
We know generally what we mean by the discovery phase.
That's where you interview each other, like you have already done,
with these best past story questions and future questions.
So that you begin to collect, what are the common strengths,
what are the common success factors that are apparent
in this group of stakeholders, whoever you're working with?
Then with that positive core, or
set of strengths in mind, you go to your dream question, and
you go deeper into imagining a positive anticipatory image of the future.
And once you have found the few images that are most attractive,
then you allow people to choose, which one do they most want to work on?
And then they begin the design phase.
New action teams form.
They design an aspiration statement for their change objective.
They begin to design an action plan.
How they're going to get there.
So forth and so on.
And that leads to the implementation, or the destiny phase.
Now, all this, as you can see on the diagram
is predicated on what we call the affirmative topic choice.
So it all begins with, what are we going to do the appreciative inquiry on?
What is it that we're going to study?
Because we know from those underlined principles that
if we study it we will begin to move in that direction.
This is a really key skillset for the appreciative leader,
the ability to reframe problems, issues, opportunities and
so forth, into these affirmative topic choices that
signal right from the beginning where we hope to go,
where we hope to be as we inquire into that particular issue.
So, we say everything begins with this topic choice.
Why? Because human systems move in
the direction of what we deeply and persistently ask questions about.
And because questions themselves are the engine of change,
they are the representation of inquiry.
And inquiry drives change.
Remember one of our principles, you can ask any question in any situation.
I can go in any organization that you taking this course would work in,
and if I want to write a case study on sabotage, I can do it.
If I look hard for anything, I can find it.
So I just gave you a negative example.
I can go into any one of your organizations and
look for extraordinary examples of self-directed teamwork.
And even if you don't use that term, even if you don't really
identify as being part of teams, I can find those examples if I look hard enough.
We can ask any question in any setting.
Therefore, why wouldn't we want to ask the positive question?
Why wouldn't we want to ask the questions that are going to
head us in the direction we most want to go?
So what we need to remember always is,
whatever we're studying, we are going to grow in that direction.
So, do you want to do another survey of low morale?
Or do you want to do a survey to magnify and
learn from moments of highest engagement and commitment?
Now, I put the checkmark on the lower one because I think most of us,
if we had the two choices, would choose, well, the best for
my team, or the best for my organization is to go in the direction of
moments of highest engagement and commitment.
You could select, do another survey of low moral if you really
believed that reducing low moral was the key to your success.
This is not a right and wrong choice.
It's a choice of, where do we want to be in the future?
And it's also pointing out, these are not the same question.
If you do study low morale you are going to find ways to reduce it.
But that does not mean that you're going to get the high engagement or
high enthusiasm.
Same thing, if I study high enthusiasm and
high engagement, I'm going to find ways to get more of that.
I still may have low moral in certain pockets of the organization.
This idea of topic choice is choosing the topic that
most represents where we hope to be in the long-term.
So here's a case story.
You remember the video that you saw in an earlier session about the US Navy?
Where this admiral, the head of the Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations,
Admiral Vern Clark, was coming in to a session where they had gone through
the discovery dream design and so forth.
And he was listening to the presentations.
And then you saw the clip where he was reinforcing they're connection to their
core strengths that had been written on a ship, on the wall, a drawing.
And that they're core strengths had come from the initial paired interviews and
the stories they had shared.
Now, I told you at the time that that appreciative inquiry session, or
summit that we often call it, was focused on retention.
That was the beginning issue that we were invited to help them work with.
They told us that they were having trouble with retention.
Meaning, that the volunteers who spend their first 18 months,
at that 18 month mark they can leave or they can choose to re-up and stay.
The statistics were showing that too many people were leaving.
There weren't enough people staying,
such that they wouldn't have to spend more and more money on training.
And then lose people just at the point where they're getting comfortable with
their jobs.
They're beginning to really specialize and be able to succeed and
reach high productivity in their different job assignments.
So basically too much churn at the bottom of the organization.
So the problem given was retention.
So we sat with this CNO, Admiral Clark, in his office in the Pentagon,
and after he had explained this opening to us we said,
do you mind if we talk to you for a few minutes?
Can we interview you for a few minutes about your relationship with retention?
What it means to you, etc, etc?
And he said sure, go right ahead, my time is yours.
We have scheduled an hour and a half, or something like that.
So that's what we did.
We interviewed him spontaneously in the moment about retention.
Now I'm going to ask you to stop this tape for a moment and reflect and
even jot down, what would be a few of the questions that you would ask him?
Okay?
You're putting on your appreciative inquiry hat.
How would you word a few questions that you would
put to him at this point in the conversation?
So stop the tape now, make a few notes, and then turn it back on.
Okay, welcome back.
Let's talk about the kind of question and
then I'll share with you the questions we asked and how this initial
framing of retention got reframed into what we call the affirmative topic.
Now, I'm sure some of you must have said, well,
let's find out why he thinks people leave.
Why do people leave?
Okay, some of you may have said, well, retention,
you can look at that as the half empty, why they leave?
Or you can also look at it as, why they stay?
So, you may have come up with the question, why do you think people stay?
Both of those questions would lead you to the response which is,
we have done studies.
We've done exit interviews.
We've done interviews of people who've stayed.
I can make sure that my assistant gives you those studies on your way out today so
that you can get familiar with them.
Then he may have had a list in his head of various reasons on either side.
The key thing about both those questions, whether it's about staying or leaving,
is that it begins with a why.
That's going to get you a list.
That's going to get you something in the other person's mind that's already made,
it's already there, lists, okay?
Remember the power of stories.
Remember the power of stories as a connecting vehicle,
a bridging vehicle between people.
What we asked him was, go back to a time in your career
where you obviously weighed the decision to stay or leave.
You stayed because you've been here for over 30 years, but
tell us a story about what you remember going through to make that decision.
So we're asking a story based question, and
we're asking a personal one that's in his life.
So, he's never left.
Obviously, we can't ask him why he left.
But we can ask him a story about wrestling through that decision.
How did he make it?
What were some of the things we can
get from the story that indicate why he stayed?
So he did.
He went back to the time when his oldest daughter was in high school.
I don't remember what rank he was at that point in time, but he said that he and
his wife spend a long time wrestling with the idea, should they leave?
Because we all kind of want to protect
teenagers when they're in that high school period.
If they're moving a lot or there's a lot of transition when they're
trying to deal with all those social development issues, it's difficult.
So, that was his concern.
As a successful naval officer you're moving every 18 to 24 months
with new assignments in different parts of the country.
And so he walked through that story.
And the story obviously ended with him deciding to stay.
And then we said, well, could you go to another point?
Do you remember another time in your career where this issue of staying and
going became really, really critical, and tell us a story about that?
So he went further along to a point where he was being
head hunted by defense contractors.
They wanted to hire him into their organization to become a lobbyist
in Washington to work with the Department of Defense to help
them get contracts and so forth.
And they were offering the red carpet, the best school system, the best housing area,
a very, very lucrative salary, lots of security, etc.
And again, he talked about, they sat with the family, they really considered it,
he worked through various things that he remembered at that point he told us about.
We were about to ask him for one more story when he interrupted and he said,
this is really interesting isn't it?
And we said, what, what's so interesting?
And he said, well, both those stories, it's the same reason.
He says, I love succeeding as a leader.
The Navy gives me training, they give me responsibility and
then they give me the opportunity to take a little more responsibility with
feedback, a little bit of a safety net.
And he said, if I take that extra responsibility and succeed,
I get the feedback to help me monitor how I'm doing.
He said, if I succeed, I just love it.
He says, as selfish as they may sound,
that's really what was going on in both of those incidences.
So right then and there, the topic of retention began to shift.
It began to become something a little bit bigger.
Maybe this isn't about simply figuring out why people leave and
preventing some of that, or why people stay and
increasing some of it, maybe it's a little bit larger.
Could it be about this notion that everybody's a leader?
That there's leadership in every job at all levels.
He turned this whole question of the topic over to a task force of about 25
Naval officers of varying ranks, and he gave them two questions.
He says, I want you to decide whether or
not we should use appreciate inquiry on this issue.
And secondly, what should the wording of the goal of the summit be?
If you decide yes,
we want to have an appreciative inquiry summit, then what should be the topic?
And he shared with them his stories that he had shared with us, and
the awareness that he had of this idea of
succeeding as a leader seems to be really, really important.
The group wrestled with both questions.
They decided, yes, we want to use the appreciative inquiry process.
And the topic that they ultimately came up with was engaged and
empowered leaders at every level.
They also shard stories with each other, just like the Admiral Clark
had done with us, about when they had remembered going
through the tough decision to stay or to go, they did the same thing.
They shared those stories, they looked for the underlying success factors.
So the reframed topic, engaged and empowered leaders at every level.
The, at every level, is what addresses the retention issue.
How can you take a young volunteer who's been through three months basic training,
they're now 15 months on an assigned job,
how can you make part of that job a leadership experience?
And then how can you provide the training, the feedback,
the support so that they have a fair chance to succeed?
And if they succeed, then the idea is,
they're more likely to stay as opposed to go.
If you remember, the outcome of this particular case was that
this admiral reported to the Congress congressional hearings
that they had saved over $2 billion in unnecessary expenditures on training.
In other words, retention had gone up such that they had reduced training and
saved $2 billion I think three years after this AI project had begun.
[MUSIC]
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