A design approach to discover and inquire into what works. Appreciative Inquiry introduces a shift in focus to people, organizations, and systems co-creating strategies to replace buy-in with commitment, understanding, and ownership.
The glass half full or glass half empty analogy presents a shortcut perspective to infer either an optimist view or a pessimist view of the world, respectively.
However, with an appreciative mindset the glass is neither half full nor half empty, the glass is full.
A full glass now provides a more complete perspective of possibility and a full view of Appreciative Inquiry options.
The ability to change comes from the desire to change. The key to positive change is a person’s intrinsic motivation to change. Appreciative Inquiry works around a premise that we move and change in the direction we inquire.
Inquiries into problems will find problems.
Inquiries into what is working or what is best shines a light onto what works and possibilities of how it could work. Almost anyone can appreciate a switch that turns on a highlight of possibilities.
The habit of deficit-based thinking gets us into spiral of what is wrong. When we look, with our hammer, for things to fix then every interaction and process, all those nails, look right for a good hammering.
There is an alternative switch into the art of planning possibility.
An organization’s present is built upon their collected history. This history is an essential core of their organization’s being. The past set the present capabilities. Rattling an organization’s history is rattling the foundation stones of an organization’s culture.
A highlight into what people do wrong attracts attention to … what people do wrong. No one likes association to something broken. No one likes it pointed out they work within, are part of, or manage broken processes.
An intervention should not open an inquisition for blame and shame, but an inquiry into the possibility of what can be.
Crowdsourcing taps into the sociological power of people potentially unfamiliar with each other or with the situation. Crowdsourcing a strategic solution is the antithesis of the bureaucratic, and often autocratic, strategic planning performed by chosen few, behind closed doors, and finally unleashed unto the masses.
Appreciative Inquiry is a process where people participate and co-create a future they wish to be part of. Where people, formerly known as an audience of employees or stakeholders, now become the collaborators and designers who are approached as partners in modeling and forming organization strategy.
The result: replace a strategic plan pronouncement with strategic plan involvement.
A leader’s job is to not create a space that causes so much pain that people must move, but to create a compelling future vision people are drawn to.
If leadership starts their focus on what did not work or what you do not want to happen then effort goes into putting procedures in place that constrain. If leadership focus starts on what worked or what it looks like when it worked and the focus shifts to how it worked to and what is achievable, what is possible.
Appreciative Inquiry, as a principle for design and change management, allows organizations to change the focus. Where we inquire, we move and Appreciative Inquiry changes the change.