Define: Focusing on the Positive
,Significant organization change is often catalyzed by some form of external pressure or opportunity (for example, decreasing customer satisfaction, emerging technologies, new government regulations, shifts in the competitive landscape, unforeseen market opportunities, changing stakeholder expectations, or, more generally, a desire to increase collaboration and to share knowledge, ideas, and successes). As an organization begins to contemplate systematic and deliberate change in response to these pressures or opportunities, one of the first activities is generally a situation analysis: “Where are we right now in relation to ‘issue X’?” In other words, faced with some impetus for change, the first conscious step undertaken by human systems is to study the situation and to generate “data”—that is, “knowledge” about the situation. This critical first decision to search for data/knowledge starts a chain of events that is “fateful.” Ways of changing the organization’s relationship to the identified catalyst of “issue X” are defined in this first chain of events.
The AI perspective suggests that before the first question is asked, the client organization is faced with the most important choice of the whole change process. Appreciative Inquiry begins when the organization consciously chooses to focus on the positive as the focus of inquiry. As a result, the first choice point is not whether to collect data about an issue, but rather what the focus of the data collection process will be. In our experience, many organizations choose a negative focus (“What’s wrong with this issue?”) without even realizing that there are other alternatives open to them.
If clients follow the traditional approach, they will focus on the obstacles they face, the problems they have, the malfunctions that have caused them to be in their current situations, and so on. The Appreciative Inquiry approach shifts that focus. The search becomes a process of sharing stories about the positive history of the situation, that is, to generate knowledge by exploring moments in the organization’s present or past when the “issue” being studied has given life to their organization. For example, if the focus is on “customer dissatisfaction,” the choice is between the traditional questions: “What are we doing wrong that is causing customer dissatisfaction? What do we need to do to decrease customer dissatisfaction?” and the AI questions: “When have our customers been really happy and satisfied with our company? What were we doing then that we can learn from and build on? What images and ideas come from these success stories that lead us to new ways to increase customer satisfaction?” Thus, the choice of questions is based on the realization that we will find more of what we look for, the outcome of which in the deficit search is more and more information about what is wrong, undesirable, and troubling. In the positive-focused inquiry (the AI approach), the outcome is a clear understanding about what the organization wants in the area of customer satisfaction and how they have gotten that positive outcome in the past.
Raising the Choice Point
The following examples describe opening dialogue with client systems that clearly differentiates the first core process of AI—focus on the positive as a core value. Although it is simple enough to suggest that organization interventions for solving problems can be approached from a positive rather than a deficit frame, it is quite another matter to convince clients or your own organization that this positive frame will work. Remember that, from the point of view of our current paradigm, we are taught in all of our cultural institutions that analysis of deficits will lead to future success. AI suggests that the most productive way to address any situation defined as a “deficit” is to look at the same or a similar situation when the outcomes have been positive and successful. So your first conversations with the organization are critically important, and the choice of focus will determine how the whole process will unfold. Remember, however, that you are not selling AI as an intervention. Rather, you are proposing to facilitate whatever intervention the client requests by approaching it from an AI perspective. The following two examples—a gender project and an evaluation—demonstrate how the opening dialogue might go.
Example 1: Increasing Gender Equity
The international division of a large corporation was facing regulatory, outside stakeholder, and employee pressure to deal with an organizational culture that limited the contributions women could make to the health and vitality of the corporation. There was also concern that women were rarely able to reach the higher levels in the company’s management structure. The “problem” was defined as a male dominated culture in the company because of the history, tradition, and beliefs that defined the behavior of men and proscribed the role of women. The company decided to move globally toward gender equity in all parts of the corporation.
In the international division described in this example, managers were ready to address the “problem.” Their first thought, and the advice of some consultants who regularly worked with the company, was to collect information about the breadth and depth of the “problem.” They called in a consulting team known for its work on gender issues and outlined for the consultants the “problem” and their readiness to address it by finding out what was wrong and figuring out how to fix it.
The response of the consulting team went something like this: “We all agree that the first step is to understand more about what’s really going on around here. This means we have a big choice to make here. We can search for evidence of sexism, incidents of discrimination, in order to see how widespread and deep this problem really is. And when we find them we can analyze the factors and dynamics that allow this sort of behavior to flourish.” The division managers nodded their heads in recognition of this traditional approach.
The next statement from the consultants, however, raised some eyebrows and led to some doubts and skepticism, as well as many questions: “Or,” the consultants continued, “we can search for examples of exceptional cross-gender relationships. We can search out stories and examples of moments when both parties in the relationship felt fully valued and very productive together, and we can use that data to determine what conditions and factors were present in those instances that supported such a good relationship. Our choice is whether we focus on moments of breakdown in cross-gender relations in this company or focus and learn from moments of excellence—no matter how rare they may or may not be.” By choosing to focus on the positive in this case, two years later the company won the Catalyst Award granted annually to honor companies for innovative organizational approaches with proven, measurable results that address the recruitment, development, and advancement of all women.
Example 2: Evaluation Becomes Valuation
We received a call from the OD/HR department of a transnational pharmaceutical company. The company had just spent a large amount of money and a lot of corporate “goodwill” on putting their top four hundred research managers and scientists through an intensive workshop using a computer simulation to give participants experience with the company’s portfolio and process management model. The question to us as consultants was whether we could provide an outside evaluation of the degree to which the workshop had been a good investment of corporate resources, human and financial. The HR representative indicated that, depending on what we found, a decision would be made to continue or to cancel the training program.
After some reflection on the request, we called back and said, “We know you want to collect information from within your organization about the impact of the workshop and we know that you need to decide whether and how to proceed. You could do this in two ways. The traditional ‘scientific’ way would be to determine through external judgment whether or not your program had any impact on behavior at all and just how much the participants in the program actually understood. From this traditional perspective we could help you focus on the gaps and how to bridge those gaps in future program design. Or we could study together the assumption that participants had some degree of learning and that they have, to some degree, translated that learning into changed behavior in the workplace. In other words, you could chose to search for, understand, and then find ways to enhance examples of times when participants successfully learned the company’s approach to portfolio and process management. And you could find moments of high transfer of learning from the classroom to the workplace and determine what conditions contributed to that success. You could then find ways of creating those supporting conditions more frequently.”
In the two examples given above, we see the beginnings of the first core process in AI—focusing on the positive as a core value. Since clients, like the rest of us, have been educated in a deficit-oriented problem-solving approach that emphasizes looking for the obstacles, the gaps, or dysfunctions in a situation, they are often taken aback by any suggestion that solving their problems could be done more effectively by focusing on the positive as a core value.
Explaining and Demonstrating AI
Whether you are an external consultant, internal staff person, or line manager responsible for a particular operating group, one of the very first challenges in beginning an AI-based change process is to introduce the concepts and research underlying AI. Of course, it is also desirable to connect this first introduction of AI with some sort of participative decision making as to the applicability of AI and next steps for the system. Key questions to ask are:
- Is this approach right for you and this situation?
- If this approach feels right to you, what will the topic of the inquiry be? And how shall we phrase the topic in a manner congruent with a choice to focus on the positive as a core value?
- If we proceed with this approach, what are the essential elements that need to be present for the change to be successful?
- If we proceed with this approach, who should be involved in developing the customized protocol and in designing the overall “inquiry architecture.” Should there be a “core team” of people to do this design work and, if so, what group in the organization will guide and support the work of the core team?
(To add a personal note, in all of our work with client systems we request a core team made up of a diverse cross-section of the organization. In most cases we have been successful and this group becomes the “co-creators” of the AI process for their organization. Often, we have found, they are also the people who imbed AI in the organization so that it thrives long after we are gone. We have come to believe that just as the first questions we ask are fateful, this first group—its composition, enthusiasm for the project, and commitment to the organization—can be “fateful.” A really first-rate core team has a powerful positive effect on the success of the AI process in the organization. We will talk more about the role of this team in subsequent chapters. Suffice it to say that the earlier you can have the organization identify such a group and the more they are involved from the very beginning, the more you will be able to co-create an AI process that will be unique and appropriate to that organization.)
In any case, clarifying and agreeing on this first core AI process typically calls for many dialogues between the AI practitioner and the representatives of the organization. Sometimes these dialogues happen over the phone or in conjunction with face-to-face meetings with the decision being made through those conversations.
In some cases the potential client may ask for a brief, formal presentation by the consultant to some decision-making group from the organization. An outline for a forty-five-minute presentation is included here. We consider forty-five minutes to be the very minimum, to say the least. Clearly, it is too short a time to expect that all the questions about AI will be answered. However, the forty-five-minute introduction is presented here because of its utility in building a base for the longer sessions—and because forty-five minutes is sometimes all we have to work with.
Sample Forty-Five-Minute Introduction to AI
The goal of this introduction to AI is to introduce the concepts and research underlying AI in a way that is both energizing enough for people to want more while being sufficiently comprehensive so that people get a sense of AI’s full potential as a framework for whole systems change rather than seeing it as just the process of asking a few nice questions or looking at the world with an appreciative eye.
What Is Appreciative Inquiry?
- Appreciative Inquiry is a practical philosophy of being in the world at a day-to-day level, and it is also a highly flexible process for engaging people to build the kinds of organizations and world that they want to live in.
- As a practical philosophy of being in the world at a day-to-day level, AI invites us to choose consciously to seek out and inquire into that which is generative and life enriching both in our own lives and in the lives of others, along with an exploration of our hopes and dreams for the future.
- As a process for engaging people in building the kinds of organizations and a world that they want to live in, AI involves collaborative, inclusive discovery of what gives a system “life” when it is most effective and capable in economic, ecological, and human terms and the weaving of that new knowledge into the fabric of the organization’s formal and informal infrastructure.
- Appreciative Inquiry is not another OD intervention; rather, it is a new approach to existing OD interventions such as strategic planning, business process redesign, team building, organization restructuring, individual and project evaluation, coaching, diversity work, and so on.
The AI Process May Look Like This
Choose a model from Chapter 3. Put the model on chart paper or on an overhead and use it to give a brief explanation of the overall AI process, making it clear that there is no formula for using AI, just guiding principles and some models created by practitioners who are explaining approaches that have been tested and adapted.
An Inquiry Mini Experience
After you have presented your introductory comments, tell participants that they will now take part in a brief inquiry experience. Ask the participants to form pairs. (A threesome works fine if you do not have an equal number of participants.) Tell them that one partner will interview the other for five minutes and then switch roles for another five minutes.
Tell the interviewers that their goal is to encourage a vivid description of events and to help the interviewees tell very descriptive and detailed stories. Encourage expansion of the stories’ richness by using comments such as, “Tell me more about the part when. …”
Post the following two interview questions on a chart and tell the participants to begin.
Interview Questions
1. Think about a time when you were really engaged in and excited about your work. Tell me your story about that time. What was happening? What were you feeling? What made it a great moment? What were others doing that contributed to this being a great moment for you? What did you contribute to creating this moment?
2. If you had three wishes for your organization, what would they be?
After the interviews are complete, debrief the interview process by asking participants, “What was that experience like for you?”
Two Intertwined Ideas Under-Girding the Practice of Appreciative Inquiry
1. The Image—Action Connection
A. What happens when:
- You tell a three-year-old, “Don’t go near the pool”?
- You give your golfing buddy, just before she swings the club, the following advice: “See those trees on the right? Be really careful not to hit your ball into those trees!”
- You are on your way to meet with someone who always makes you feel very good about yourself, someone with whom you find yourself laughing frequently and behaving in an unguarded, spontaneous manner?
B. Mini-Lecture
- Using your own knowledge and the information on the scientific theories about positive image and positive action presented in Chapter 2, explain to participants the connection between positive and negative images and human behavior.
- If you have time you might ask the audience for examples from their own lives.
2. Social Constructionism: The Role of Conversations in Creating Social Reality
THE TRADITIONAL VIEW OF “REALITY,” particularly as it applies to human behavior, is that:
- Reality only exists externally to us;
- The eye is a neutral mirror of the reality that is “out there”;
- The function of language is to describe the “given” reality of the world;
- THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONIST PERSPECTIVE holds that through language and social discourse, we are constantly evolving and creating new realities;
- The images of things that we anticipate (like the anticipation of seeing someone who makes you feel really good about yourself) are a powerful reality in and of themselves;
- These images lead to actions/behaviors; and
- Conversations (particularly inquiry) continuously create new images that in turn lead to new actions, which in turn create “new realities.”
Since we can decide what to focus on in our conversations we have a choice. If we are focused on “improving” an organization, a team, a family, or a relationship, for example, we can choose to focus on what is broken, what is a problem, what is frustrating us, or we can choose to focus on that which is life-giving, energizing, and valuable to us. The choice is fateful!
In Summary
AI is an approach to the development of human systems that recognizes that we can choose to approach human systems with the view that either:
1. Human systems are primarily constellations of problems/obstacles to be analyzed and overcome, or
2. Human systems contain mysterious life-giving forces to be understood and embraced.
AI recognizes that whichever assumption we make about the nature of reality, that choice will lead us to a certain focus in our conversations. And those conversations will lead to certain images being dominant in our minds and those images will in turn lead to action at both the conscious and unconscious level.
Appreciative Inquiry uses the power of inquiry to engage our imagination, which in turn influences our actions. By focusing through Inquiry on that which is life-giving, that which is energizing, that which is joyful and fun—and amplifying those qualities by involving the “whole system” in co-construction and co-innovation based on the findings of the inquiry, AI enables systems to transform themselves.
If there is time left, people generally have a lot of questions!
Identifying the Focus for Inquiry
In the process of choosing to focus on the positive, the early dialogues must also include explorations leading to a decision on topic choice—the primary area of focus for the upcoming inquiry described in Chapter 5. The topic choices are guided by the overall purpose of the project (such as gender equity and evaluation in our previous examples).
These discussions about the focus of the work and the resulting topics to be explored are governed by the Principle of Simultaneity. As we seek to understand a situation by gathering data, the first question we ask is fateful. The organization will turn its energy in the direction of that first question, whether positive or negative. The seeds of change are embedded in that first question. Careful, thoughtful, and informed choice of topic(s) is important as it defines the scope of the inquiry, providing the framework for subsequent interviews and data collection.
Since AI begins and ends with valuing that which gives life to organizations, during their preparation work inquirers choose affirmative topics based on bold hunches about what gives life to their organization and formulate questions to explore those topics. They also write questions that encourage conversations about the desired future of the organization. The topics and questions focus the organization members on what they most want to see grow and flourish.
Without the client system making the choice to focus on the positive as a core value, it is not possible to proceed with an AI process of change. In making this choice, the client needs to understand that choosing to focus on the positive does not mean excluding any reference to difficulties or obstacles. In fact, truth telling in Appreciative Inquiry is just as valued as it is in the traditional deficit-based problem-solving approach. And it is a great deal easier to tell the truth about positive experiences! The choice about how to resolve difficult situations lies in both the choice of the primary focus for inquiry—positive or deficit-based—and in whether difficulties are seen as immovable obstacles or as sources of insight into strategies for effective forward movement. AI is at its most powerful when it is used to seek out the ray of light in what seems to be a totally dark and dismal situation!
As in all things with Appreciative Inquiry, there are multiple ways to proceed once you are asked to go forward in an organization. Topics are sometimes chosen by the client who brought you into the organization or, if you are an internal consultant or manager, by your own understanding of a situation. In time-limited and subject-focused processes—team building, conflict resolution, etc.—the topic is clear. Often your task in those situations is simply to help create AI questions about that topic: “Tell me a story about the very best team you ever worked or played with,” and so on. However, in complex system change (the major focus of this book) the second part of imbedding the positive core value is to facilitate a group—ideally a core group assigned to you, as we suggested—to identify key topics that are affirmative. For example, an AI topic to study might be “excellent customer service” rather than “improving customer service.” This process of topic selection goes from the simple naming of the topic to be studied all the way to large system involvement in identifying the topics that are most important to people in the system. Following is a detailed example of an actual four-hour workshop that led to topic choices.
Example: A Four-Hour Design to Initiate an AI-Based Process
This design was used at the initial meeting of an eight-person leadership team at a school recently formed through the merger of three schools. The response to the merger ranged from hostility to confusion to apathy to a sense of loss to moderate support for the merger. The hoped for change was the creation of a new culture that would contain the best of the past cultures.
The meeting included the school principal who was our primary client and his eight-person leadership team, which included representatives of all sections of the school. Prior to this four-hour meeting, the principal, an internal evaluation specialist, met with one of us for a two-hour session to explore the possibility of working together using AI as a framework for the work. During that two-hour meeting, the principle explained the following:
- The school size was about six hundred students and fifty staff, including faculty administrators and educational technologists (teachers’ assistants). It was a “new” school in the sense that about 30 percent of the faculty had moved there from other schools.
- The principal, in his first year at this school, was also new.
- Both the faculty who had come from other schools and the original faculty felt as if they had lost something. In the case of the original faculty, they felt a sense of loss of the “old family,” including a much-liked previous principal; in the case of the new faculty, they were missing the schools they had left behind.
- The time available for the involvement of school faculty in the determination of the school’s future educational environment/culture and their roles within it was very limited (six hours in two-hour increments over a period of six weeks).
By the end of the two-hour meeting, the author, the principal, and the evaluation specialist had concluded that an appropriate next step was to gather the existing leadership team at the school for four hours in order to:
1. Obtain support for proceeding with this process
- By introducing how Appreciative Inquiry is a process for positive change
- By describing the phases of the process and the choices available; the role of this group in supporting and guiding the process; and the role of an interviewer group
2. Agree on an overall project focus and scope (future of the school? or something more specific?)
3. Agree on preliminary project strategy, including
- Timing of various phases/steps
- Participation—who needs to be involved in which phases/activities and how will we involve them?
- What resources are available to draw on throughout this process and what other activities are underway to which we should link this process?
4. Clarify next steps and individual responsibilities
Table 4.1 is the design of the actual four-hour meeting, along with key “lecturette” notes:
Table 4.1. Sample Four-Hour Design
| Time | Activity | Lecturette Notes |
| 8:00–8:15 | Introductions: goals and participants’ hopes for this session |
|
| 8:15–8:25 | Micro Overview of Appreciative Inquiry | Over the last thirty years of working in both the public and private sectors, my experience has been that people are usually willing to talk about what’s wrong, but as they talk about it, there seems to be a downward spiral or despair. Instead of being energized, people became de-energized. David Cooperrider reviewed research on the connection of image and action, research from medicine, education, and psychology, and developed Appreciative Inquiry–-the idea that there is a connection between the images we hold of what is possible and the questions we ask about our past and present. The Al approach to change can be applied to your family, your team, your school. The approach is like a journey that engages people in creating the sort of school or team or family or community that they want to live in. It focuses people on what happens when things are at their best. The rationale is twofold: (1) When you focus on the positive, it becomes a spring-board (energizer) for the future and (2) it also generates exceptionally useful information about what to enhance and build on as you move into the future together. |
| “Very briefly: the phases of an Al-based change process are initiate (this meeting); inquire (find out what contributes to moments of greatness so we can expand this in the future; we want to articulate profound knowledge of a system when it is operating at its best); imagine (collectively imagine what could be, how it would be if the moments of greatness are the norm, rather than the exception); and innovate (What changes do we want to make so that what we imagine can happen?)” | ||
| 8:25–9:15 | Paired “exceptional moment” interviews | Form the participants into pairs (if the number is
uneven, form one group of three). Ask the pairs to take turns
interviewing each other using the following questions. Each
interview should last twenty minutes. 1. What first attracted you to your work, to your profession? What were your initial impressions? What excited you? 2. In each of our lives there are special times when we just know that we have made the right career choice, moments when we feel really good about the work we are doing and what we are contributing to others. As you think back over the last four or five years, can you tell me a story about one of those special moments when you felt most alive, involved, and excited about your work and when you were affirmed in your commitment to being part of the teaching/learning?
3. Without being humble, tell me what you value deeply
4. What is the single most important thing your work has contributed to your life? 5. What is the core factor that gives vitality and life to this school–-the one thing without which this place would just not be the same? 6. If you had three wishes to spend on creating a participative change process that would load to the best possible learning and working environment, an environment that would be a significant expansion of the best that you have experienced in your past, what would you wish for? |
| 9:15–9:20 | Debrief of the interview process | What was the process like for you? |
| 9:20–9:30 | BREAK | |
| 9:30–10:30 | Exploration of interview content |
|
| 10:30–11:30 | Description of and dialogue about the proposed journey/Al process and the choice points, plus … |
|
| 11:30–11:45 | Clarify next steps | Create an act on plan for:
|
| 11:45–12:00 | Appreciative debrief of today’s meeting and meeting closure |
|
In larger, more complex organizations, this topic-selection process is often embedded in a longer workshop that leads to the second core process of AI—inquiry into stories of what gives life to the organization. We offer clients an exploratory workshop (see the two-day preparation workshop in Chapter 5) for a decision-making group in the organization. The workshop clarifies the difference between the AI approach and that of more traditional approaches to change. It includes an introduction to Appreciative Inquiry, a discussion of the shifting paradigm, and an examination of the theory of change that underlies this approach. It often includes identifying topics and writing questions for the Appreciative Inquiry protocol used in the inquiry phase of the second core AI process. The outcome of this exploratory workshop can be a go/no go decision. Alternatively, this can be the kick-off event to an already agreed-on AI change process. In this case, the workshop includes creation of a customized interview protocol and decisions on inquiry architecture. We will describe both of these more in the next chapter.
Overall, the first core AI process can be considered complete when:
- The client system makes an informed choice to focus on the positive as a core value, and
- The choice of topics for the AI process are inquired into in ways that are congruent with the decision to focus on the positive.