What gets you out of bed each morning? And what lights you up and makes you feel most alive? How often do you really ask yourself these questions? Or take the time to ask them of other? If your answer is “not often” you’re in good company, but what might start happening if you do?
“When we ask these types of questions something magical happens,” explained Jon Berghoff, from the Flourishing Leadership Institute, when I interviewed him recently. “You discover you have the capability and potential to positively shape your future in ways you never thought possible.”
Jon has been asking Appreciative Inquiry questions such as these to help others discover what causes the human systems they are part of – such as a team, company or community – to come alive faster, to be at their best, to play to their strengths, to drive innovation from all levels within and from outside, and to naturally cultivate a deeper sense of purpose.
When it comes to creating changes, it can be easy to focus on what’s wrong, what’s missing, what’s not working and what needs fixing. And while it might be a helpful way to understand how you got to where you are, it’s not necessarily a great way to create the energy, buy-in and momentum that you may need to get to where you want to go now.
However, when we ask Appreciative Inquiry questions they don’t ignore the problems, but do use a different lens to work with them. So rather than getting stuck on what’s broken, they reframe your questions to focus on what you value, want to grow and what you’re willing to take responsibility for making happen.
Appreciative Inquiry uses a simple 4D cycle to guide these questions – discover, dream design, deploy – and create changes that last. For example by:
You can ask these questions of yourself, a colleague, an entire team or even a whole organization or community. For example, Appreciative Inquiry is what’s helping the City of Cleveland become a ‘thriving green city on a blue lake’. Their three day Appreciative Inquiry Summit brought together hundreds of people from all walks of life – local neighborhoods, business leaders, nonprofits, government, universities, religious leaders, and schools – to discover how they could leverage off their assets and overcome challenges, to deliver economic, social and environmental wellbeing for all their citizens. As a result they’re transforming their city through such things as energy efficiency measures, creating urban farms, and promoting healthier ways to get around.
“If you’re going to create change across an entire system, it’s important to bring in as many different voices as possible that are impacted by the system to be part of discussions,” advised Jon. “You’ll find that the level of commitment and desire to make the future happen is so much higher, faster, and more efficient than just sending out the vision and hoping people get it.”
Jon offered three suggestions on how you can bring the principles of Appreciative Inquiry into your workplace by asking more of the following questions:
What appreciative questions can you start asking to shape your own and the wellbeing of others around you?
What is Appreciative Inquiry?
Some definitions of appreciative inquiry have included:
“A positive approach to leadership development and organisational change” (Investopedia.com)
“A model that seeks to engage stakeholders in self-determined change” (Wikipedia.org)
“The art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential”. (betterevaluation.org)
“A way to encourage a group of people to adopt positive change. It focuses on what’s working, rather than what’s not, and leads to people co-designing their own future”. (positivepsychology.com)
What appreciative inquiry aims to do is tap into the skillsets of people in an organisation, along with its values and beliefs, when it is working at top capacity, or when its strengths are being utilised effectively.
The following table gives a clearer indication of the differences between how businesses tend to deal with issues involving change, and how applying AI could create another paradigm:
Appreciating what we have now and how it works
What might be in the future
You can probably guess from the above that the appreciative inquiry model addresses the same concerns but against a differing paradigm, helping people to apply a positive approach to any changes that need to be made.
And that brings us to exactly ‘how’ it can be utilised in a business. Through deep-dive, focused questioning.
Design Questions
It’s at this point that we start to see actions put into place. The positive, appreciative questions we cover here help people to see what they need to physically do and how they need to behave to accomplish the dream goals. Ideas could include:
These types of questions help people design what would make a successful project work in the future.
When it comes to creating changes, it can be easy to focus on what’s wrong, what’s missing, what’s not working and what needs fixing. And while it might be a helpful way to understand how you got to where you are, it’s not necessarily a great way to create the energy, buy-in and momentum that you may need to get to where you want to go now.
You can ask these questions of yourself, a colleague, an entire team or even a whole organization or community. For example, Appreciative Inquiry is what’s helping the City of Cleveland become a ‘thriving green city on a blue lake’. Their three day Appreciative Inquiry Summit brought together hundreds of people from all walks of life – local neighborhoods, business leaders, nonprofits, government, universities, religious leaders, and schools – to discover how they could leverage off their assets and overcome challenges, to deliver economic, social and environmental wellbeing for all their citizens. As a result they’re transforming their city through such things as energy efficiency measures, creating urban farms, and promoting healthier ways to get around.
“If you’re going to create change across an entire system, it’s important to bring in as many different voices as possible that are impacted by the system to be part of discussions,” advised Jon. “You’ll find that the level of commitment and desire to make the future happen is so much higher, faster, and more efficient than just sending out the vision and hoping people get it.”
What appreciative questions can you start asking to shape your own and the wellbeing of others around you?
Jon offered three suggestions on how you can bring the principles of Appreciative Inquiry into your workplace by asking more of the following questions: