Introduction to Appreciative Inquiry

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Introduction to Appreciative Inquiry

• Sarah Lewis

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Appreciative Inquiry

• What is it and whats new about it?
• How does it work?
• How do you do it?
• What are the implications for practice?

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What is it?

• Theory and practice of organisational change
• That grew out of a dissatisfaction with Action
  Research
• Post modern in its ontological and
  epistemological base
• David Cooperrider, Suresh Srivastva

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So whats new in appreciative inquiry?

• Organisations as the triumph of the human
  imagination
• Organisations as products of human interaction
  and mind
• Not how things go wrong - isnt it amazing they
  work at all
• The move from deficit language to life centric
  approaches
• From vocabularies of human deficit to
  vocabularies of hope
• Organisations dont need fixing, need constant
  re-affirmation

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Why appreciative?

• Appreciation is a process of affirmation, it is
  an act of attention
• Create change by paying attention to what you
  want more of
• Appreciation helps groups generate images for
  themselves based on an affirmative understanding
  of their past.

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Appreciative Inquiry Problem Solving

• Problem solving
• Felt need identification of problem
• Analysis of causes
• Analysis of possible solutions
• Action planning (treatment)
• Basic assumption organisation is a problem to be
  solved

• Appreciative inquiry
• Appreciating and valuing the best of what is
• Envisioning what might be
• Dialoguing what should be
• Innovating what will be
• Basic assumption organisation is a mystery to be
  embraced.

Hammond 1996
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How does appreciative inquiry make a difference?

• Through appreciating organisations as living
  systems
• Through attending to the creative process as
  opposed to the curative
• Through recognizing mental processes as causal
• Though recognizing organisation as a miracle of
  cooperative human interaction
• Through language
• Through social innovation

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Appreciative inquiry principles

• The constructionist principle
• The simultaneity principle
• The poetic principle
• The anticipatory principle
• The positive principle

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Assumptions of appreciative inquiry

• In every society, organisation or group,
  something works
• What we focus on becomes our reality
• Reality is created in the moment and there are
  multiple realities
• The act of asking a question influences in some
  way
• People have more confidence and comfort to
  journey to the future when they carry forward
  parts of the past

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Assumptions of appreciative inquiry

• If we carry parts of the past forward, they
  should be what is best about the past
• It is important to value difference
• The language we use creates our reality
• (Hammond 1996)

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Language, theory and moral order

• Theory provides a perceptual framework
• Choice of what to study carries a degree of
  responsibility
• Language and words are the building blocks of
  social reality
• Not a passive purveyor of meaning between people,
  rather, an agent active in the creation of
  meaning
• Knowledge of a system can be used to change itself

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The four D model

• Identify those peak times when everything
  operated perfectly
• What factors were behind the peak experiences
• What intervention will make the peak experience
  the norm?
• Affirmative topics, always homegrown, can be on
  anything the people in the organisation feel
  gives life to the system

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The four D model

• Discovery Discover and disclose positive
  capacity
• Dreaming A sense of how things could be
• Design Creation of the ideal organisation
• Destiny An inspired movement

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Appreciative Inquiry
Discover and Value the best of what is
Affirmative Topic Choice
Destiny (co-construct the future) What will be
Dreaming (envisioning the future) What might be
Design through Dialogue What should be
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The appreciative interview

• In pairs
• Each - identify a specific event when you feel
  you really made a difference, a really special
  event
• Interview each other to re-create that
  experience What? How? Who else? Feelings, talk,
  noticing, How did it make a difference? And so on
  - rich experience
• What was different in that situation to other
  similar situations where you werent able to make
  such a difference?
• When have both had your turn - reflections - what
  do you notice about the experience you have just
  had?
• 15 mins/15 mins /10 mins

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Benedictine University

• Traditional academic culture
• Ill equipped to respond to demands for change
• Strategic planning - culture change
• Decision to use Faculty meeting/ AI
• All 86 staff new and returning
• High level of participation
• Pursuit of an ideal
• Grounded in research
• Mutual interviewing

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Benedictine University

• Recorded
• Shaped in core values
• Learning
• Speed at which able to capture data from all
  faculty
• Focus on positive possible produced upbeat
  tone
• Cynicism set aside, transcending problems,
  celebrating strengths
• Process on going

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Quantitative research

• Fortune 500, 94 fast food restaurants, one area
• Problem retention salaried restaurant staff
• 3 groups AI, normal problem solving, nothing
• One year collecting base line data - turnover
• 18 months intervention.
• One AI meeting a month each restaurant
• Three meeting each general manager
• One roundtable washup

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Results

• AI group 30 higher retention than normal group
• AI group 32 higher retention than nothing
  group
• Al group less inclined to leave
• 103,320 savings in hard training dollars
• Confounding factor - leadership

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Appreciative Process

• Discovering the best of
• Understanding what creates the best of
• Amplifying the people and processes who best
  exemplify the best of
• Giving attention to what is working well
• Watching for what you want to see
• Amplifying it when you see it

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Amplification

• Stories
• Quality of stories told (new telling, new
  insight)
• Recording of stories told - rich in detail, own
  voice
• Sharing of stories told
• Thematic feedback documents
• Video
• Propositions - capturing the elements
• Surveys
• Feedback on surveys

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How does this connect with what Im doing?

• In small groups
• Thinking
• Spending my time
• Hoping
• Planning
• Dreaming
• Feedback - existing points of connection

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Appreciative inquiry language

• Talk as a medium to achieve change
• The placing of attention
• The sense created by talk
• The research question is the intervention and
  is fateful and impactful

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Organisation post modern understanding of
language

• Language and talk is contextful
• Language and talk are fateful
• Socially constructed world
• Language is action
• The future is created in the present
• Talk creates affordances and constraints

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Research into AI What matters most?

• The power of positive questions
• The appreciative inquiry interview
• Story telling
• Future vision/ provocative propositions
• Positive image
• Collaboration/co-constructing/common ground
• Anticipatory principle
• Continuity
• Replacing deficit discourse
• (Yaeger and Sorensen 2001)

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Role of consultant

• Explorers not mechanics
• Active agent not impartial bystander
• Wordsmith
• Collaborator
• Generous, curious, appreciative, systemic

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Implications for managers and leaders

• The main task of management is meaning making and
  creating possibilities to go on
• Organisations are networks of conversation in
  which accounts are created
• More than one account can exist, none is the
  truth, all may be true
• Conversation/communication contains moral order
• Affect action through communication

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How will I use this, if at all?
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Sarah Lewis Jemstone Consultancy 020 8293
0017 sarahlewis_at_jemstoneconsultancy.co.uk www.jems
toneconsultancy.co.uk
Thank you