CHAPTER 5
Inquire into Stories of What Gives Life in the System (Discover)
“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
Muriel Rukeyser, American poet and writer
“We can tell people abstract rules of thumb, which we have derived from prior experiences, but it is very difficult for other people to learn from these. We have difficulty remembering such abstractions, but we can more easily remember a good story. Stories give life to past experience. Stories make the events in memory memorable to others and to ourselves. This is one of the reasons why people like to tell stories.”
Roger C. Shank, Tell Me a Story
THE PRIMARY WORK IN THE SECOND GENERIC AI PROCESS is conducting the interviews that constitute the research into the topics that have been identified in the previous process.
The Appreciative Inquiry interview is a process for exploring the “life-giving” factors of the organization. It is a process of discovery. The data collected in the interviews helps you to locate, illuminate, and understand the distinctive strengths that give your organization life and vitality when it is functioning at its best.
The AI interview represents the core of the inquiry process. This interview—in no way a traditional interview seeking facts and opinions—is a mutual learning process. Both the interviewer and the person interviewed learn as together they explore the values, peak experiences and wishes for the organization by sharing stories.
In preparation for this core process of inquiring into stories, the client system (usually with help from an experienced AI practitioner) must:
- Understand and support the rationale for collecting “data” in the form of stories rather than in the more traditional quantitative, analytic, and reductionist methods;
- Develop a customized interview protocol focused on the primary topic chosen for inquiry during the first core process; and
- Agree on the inquiry process: Who will be interviewed? By whom? When, how, where? And how will the information be collected, saved, used to make decisions about the future of the organization?
In this chapter, we explore each of these points in more detail. At the end of this chapter we also deal with the question of training for interviewers.