Organization Development
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APPRECIATIVEINQUIRY.pdf
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We hope to inspire team leaders to try Appreciative Inquiry (AI) Lean by asking a few
simple questions and then evaluate if the value of this approach is big enough to use
it more systematically. In the process, we also hope to show Lean practitioners how
to integrate AI into their practice. We think both AI and Lean can be useful even if you
do not implement it 100% in everything you do. For most companies it will be better
to let the results speak for themselves, instead of insisting on all or nothing. Both AI
and Lean have valuable contributions to all companies. Finally we hope to inspire AI
practitioners to join the language of Lean, so they can join forces with kindred spirits,
who just happen to speak another language.
The core AI processes
Inquiry is all about asking questions and looking for inspiring answers and responses.
The questions we use in AI are open questions that invite people to share their
personal experience and points of view. You can decide to inquire into specific
issues or many issues, and you can choose to inquire into details or into the whole.
Appreciative Inquiry can be used for all combinations of inquiry.
The five processes that create an appreciative conversation are shown in Figure 1.
Notice that the question marks are situated in the areas where two processes overlap.
We highly recommend that you follow the process in designing and conducting your
inquiry implied by the circular arrow. Without an appreciative focus to your inquiry,
the conversations will not release their full potential.
Appreciative Inquiry makes it easy to increase the quality of all conversations aimed at improving performance, competence development, team learning and innovative competences. This article shows how team leaders can apply AI in a Lean-based organisation, and how to think big and start small. AI works like a virus: it takes off when you infect as many conversations as possible.
dx.doi.org/10.12781/978-1-907549-25-0-4
Appreciative Inquiry Lean
Jacqueline Bustos Coral Jacqueline Bustos works as a systemic consultant and university teacher. She teaches in the master’s program Intervención en Sistemas Humanos of the Central University in Bogota (Colombia). Jacqueline has accompanied appreciative communication processes in organizational, educational and therapeutic contexts. Contact: [email protected]
AI Practitioner November 15 Bustos Coral et al: Appreciative Inquiry Lean
A New Route to Success for Team Leaders
Juan Pablo Ortiz Jiménez Juan Pablo Oritiz is a senior performance consultant, keynote speaker and facilitator at YesP in Gothenburg, Sweden and a member of the International Society for Performance Improvement, which links organizational goals and strategies with the workforce responsible for them. He has worked at the UN and as vice president of an IT company. Contact: [email protected]
Kaj Voetmann Kaj Voetmann has worked as an Appreciative Inquiry practitioner for more than 20 years in private, public and non-governmental organizations in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, United Kingsom and Colombia. He is also one of the editors of one of the most important Danish books on the practice and theory of Appreciative Inquiry. Contact: [email protected]
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In each of the processes, you also have to keep three aspects in mind simultaneously:
• What are the desired outcomes (both visible and invisible) of the inquiry?
• What are the steps you need to break the inquiry down to, and in which
order should these steps be taken?
• How are you going to organise the participants in each step to make sure
the outcomes are achieved?
Choosing an appreciative focus for the inquiry
You first need to choose an appreciative focus – or topic – for your process of inquiry.
This is a way to define the desired outcomes explicitly before you start doing anything
else. To create an appreciative focus, you have to express what you really want to
create, more so than what you want to remove. Here are some examples of how to
change to an appreciative focus.
Normal focus Appreciative focus
Reducing waste Create value for the customers
Not meeting the expected results Examples of results above the expected
Conflicts among team members Examples of collaboration in a diverse team
Resistance to change Examples of real changes
Notice that the appreciative focus aims at creating the preferred future, the future
you want, and that the appreciative focus usually opens many more aspects of life
than the normal performance improvement focus.
You can increase the power of the appreciative focus by lifting your ambitions
to extreme levels. It seems that small ambitions create small results, while large
ambitions create large results. Some people call this the ‘coal–diamond strategy’. If
you squeeze coal very hard, it is transformed into diamonds.
Figure 1: The five processes of an appreciative conversation
Table 1: Choosing an appreciative focus of inquiry
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Example
Kaj was once asked to undertake a large inquiry by a management team, who
were wondering where all the good ideas were hiding in their company. He
asked the management team if he could change one thing, the name of the
inquiry. He asked them if it was allright to invite people to a workshop with
the title ‘Let the thousand ideas blossom’. Then 200 people came and told
amazing stories about the ideas that had grown from small seeds into large
changes without much fuss.
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Large ambitions create large results: coal turns to diamonds
Collecting appreciative experiences
We are always looking for the experiences that are mostly appreciated by the people
we ask questions of. These experiences do not need to be 100% positive. It is natural
to include problems, conflicts and other things usually seen as negative. One way to
think about them is that they represent the frustrated dreams that the inquiry should
find solutions for. If you ignore them, you might lose the connection to these very
important dreams.
Notice that questions 1 and 2 ask for past and present experiences, while questions
3 and 4 begin to show the preferred future.
The part of first question that is italicised is the appreciative focus of the inquiry. All
you need to do if you change the focus to another topic is to replace this part of the
question! When you have tried to undertake your own inquiry a couple of times, you
can experiment with other questions. Until then we recommend that you try these
questions, which have proven their effectiveness in many different inquiries around
the world, in many different industries.
You should add one core ingredient to the inquiry: having an interviewer who asks
questions and helps the person describing the experiences include all aspects
of the story – with respect for the fact that it is not the interviewer’s story to tell.
As interviewer, you can ask open questions that highlight missing aspects of the
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Problems, conflicts and other things usually seen as negative ... represent the frustrated dreams that the inquiry should find solutions for. If you ignore them, you might lose the connection to these very important dreams.
Example
In a large inquiry Jerry Porras and James Collins examined the qualities of
successful visionary companies. They found that one factor that distinguished
successful efforts from unsuccessful ones was the use of ambitious, even
outrageous, goals to motivate people and focus them toward concrete
accomplishments.
1. What are the best experiences you have had where your customers
were very pleased with your products and services?
2. What made it possible for you to have these experiences?
• What did you do?
• What did other people do?
• What were the special circumstances?
3. What could have made these experiences even better?
4. What can we learn from these experiences and how can we apply the
learning to our practice?
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experiences. The point is to be as curious as possible and help the person to tell a
good and important story filled with the drama and emotions that are just under the
surface of good experiences. It is much easier for interviewers to be curious if they do
not know the person or their work.
Sharing and mapping appreciative experiences
In this situation, an appreciative inquiry is more a collective inquiry than a personal
one. Therefore, in addition to the interviewer there should be witnesses to listen to
the story. This is easy if you have three or more people present at the interview. These
witnesses can listen in general, or they can be asked to listen for specific things in the
interview. If we keep to the appreciative focus we used before, you could ask:
If you ask the witnesses to write the things they notice on a post-it note (one post-it
for each item), it will be much easier to map the ‘ingredients’ (ideas, models, tools,
methods etc.) in the next step.
After conducting a series (three or more) of interviews with witnesses, ask the
participants to create a map of how the experiences are created. Ask the team to
answer these questions:
One of the strengths in both Lean and AI is that they inspire people to redesign
present situations and begin to visualise the new whole. Most adults are a little
reluctant to begin to make drawings because they don’t think they are ‘good’
at drawing. Yet drawings on napkins from lunch or coffee breaks have been the
inspiration for great improvements. You should always try to visualise your ideas,
and especially the whole, if you can. You only need a sketch. You can also use other
available materials to build the visualisation, such as Lego bricks.
Visualisation of the whole is a very powerful tool to apply in building the preferred
future. Notice that the visualisation begins to integrate many different experiences
into a coherent whole.
LEGO® bricks can help people to visualise a desired future
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5. What are the main ‘ingredients’ (ideas, models, tools, methods etc.)
that go into creating these experiences – either from the story or from
your own experiences?
6. When you look across the experiences we have collected, what are
the main "ingredients" (ideas, models, tools, methods etc.) that go into
creating these experiences?
7. How are these main ingredients connected?
8. How can we visualise a new practice based on these ingredients and
connections?
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Exchange stories (and visualisations) about the preferred future
Stories become powerful by sharing them, including all the details, dramas and
emotions they contain. Logical and rational stories seem to spread less well. When
you share the stories, it is important to engage the audience in the storytelling.
This can be done by inviting the audience to ask questions, add new pieces, revise
pieces or suggest competing ideas to all details and even the whole. As long as we are
building stories and visualisations of the preferred future, we want to think like the fox,
which has many entrances to and exits from its home.
Exploring paths to the preferred future
When you have a good idea about the kind of preferred future you want to build, you
can begin looking at what you already have and find out what it will take to build the
rest.
Imagine you are building a bridge to the preferred future: start by defining the gap
between the present state and the preferred future.
Then you can begin to prepare the bridge to the preferred future. Both the preferred
future and the present state have two parts: the foundations for the work; and the
competences people bring to work.
It is, psychologically, much easier to plan backwards from the future, rather plan
forwards through talking about all the obstacles to be overcome.
(Repeat the questions until you arrive back at the present state.)
It is, psychologically, much easier to plan backwards from the future, rather plan forwards through talking about all the obstacles to be overcome.
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9. Looking at the visualisations and listening to the stories, which
questions, additional (or even alternative) ideas do you have?
10. If we base our new practices on this visualisation, which things would
we have to do differently
11. If we base our new practices on this visualisation, will we be more
effective than we are today?
12. Imagine that we have built the preferred future and describe:
• What was the last step we took to get to this point?
• What was the last foundation we built before we took that last step?
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Moving to the next step in the spiral of progress
When you have completed the last process, one question still remains to work with.
This is the evaluation after you have made the preferred future come true.
When you reach the end of the inquiry process, you will always have lots of inspiration
for new appreciative topics you can inquire into.
Think big, start small
We recommend that you think of the whole process when you try to apply this
approach, and that you start by trying each step of the inquiry one at a time. You can
start by creating an appreciative focus for a meeting and see what happens. If you
want the new approach to take off in your team, you should finish every new part you
introduce with a small appreciative evaluation, which you can put into a scorecard.
Each evaluation should use this instruction:
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13. Imagine that we are at the celebration of the amazing success the
inquiry has generated and describe:
• What are the most important contributions you have observed of
yourself, from your team and from the management team?
Please talk to the person next to you for the next three minutes and answer
these questions:
a. What special moments were there in our meeting today that really made a
difference for you?
b. What made it possible for us to have these special moments?
c. What can we do to create more such special moments in our meetings?
The bridge to the preferred future
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After three minutes, ask the participants to put their answers into this scorecard:
Our Special Meetings
To keep: To improve:
List the answers to questions a and b List the answers to question c
• •
• •
• •
• •
Notice the title is an appreciative focus for evaluation of meetings and that the
scorecard is a visual tool for collecting and sharing ideas. You can take other AI
processes one-by-one and evaluate them in the same way.
Buen viaje, have a safe trip, god rejse
We wish you a great journey into the new practice in your team. If you find the courage
to embark on this journey, you run the risk of becoming a better leader, creating a
dream team, and creating unprecedented results with fewer frustrations and less
lack of implementation. If you can do that, you might even inspire your own leaders to
follow the path you have chosen.
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