Appreciative Inquiry Research

image by 123dan321 at sxc.huFrom our own experience we know how effective and energising Appreciative Inquiry can be. I would like to see more peer-reviewed research to prove its effectiveness to people who haven't yet experienced AI first-hand. 

Peer review is important, because it acts as quality control and increases the likelihood that you can trust the research methods and the findings they lead to.

There doesn't seem to be much around, even on the Appreciative Inquiry Commons site where a search on 'research' doesn't pull up much apart from PhD theses and dissertations.

One welcome exception is the website of Ray Calabrese, Professor of Educational Administration at Ohio State University. His Research page has a list of peer-reviewed articles on the use of Appreciative Inquiry in the education sector, including:

Empowering At-Risk Students Through Appreciative Inquiry

Using Appreciative Inquiry to Create a Sustainable Rural School District and Community

An Appreciative Inquiry into the Circle of Friends

Power of the AI 4-D Cycle

Special Education Teacher Retention

An Appreciative Inquiry into a Low Performing Urban High School

An Appreciative Inquiry into Educational Administration Doctoral Programs

Building Social Capital Through the use of an Appreciative Inquiry Theoretical Perspective

Teachers Struggling with Professional Development in an Urban Middle School

Learning to Appreciate At Risk Students

Emerging Technologies in Global Communication

You can follow Ray on Twitter: @osuaiperson

If you know of any other peer-reviewed research into (or using) Appreciative Inquiry, please share it by commenting on this blog or emailing us at info@positive-engagement.co.uk!

Appreciative evaluations - a different format for Appreciative Inquiry

If you are looking for a way of using Appreciative Inquiry for evaluation, or you would like to have a business-friendly alternative to the standard 4-D/5-D model, this may be what you're looking for.

Deb Gurke has written an interesting article about how school boards can use AI for self-evaluation, in a way that restores "the most important component of evaluation - the conversations that occur around performance and possibility."

It strikes me that the model she's suggesting - Review, Analyze, Plan (or RAP as I instantly started thinking of it) - is applicable beyond the school board context, and indeed beyond just evaluation. These are Deb's suggested questions for each stage, some of which are school-board-specific, others of which can be applied to any context. 

REVIEW

(1) Prior to reflecting on these questions review your Position Description and annual goals. Bring suggested revisions to the dialogue session (for boards, it can be goals that were established the previous year, components of the NSBA Key Work framework, or some other mutually agreed upon standards).

(2) Thinking about the last year, describe a time(s) when you felt the most excited, engaged and involved in your work as a board member/superintendent.

ANALYZE

(3) What were the key elements that made the above a peak time(s) or experience(s)?
(4) What things do you wish had worked better in the last year?
(5) What have you learned from these experiences?
(6) (Optional) Again, thinking about the last year, what stands out for you in your working relationship with the rest of the board?

PLAN

(7) What ideas do you have for making the key elements identified above (Question 3) more a part of your everyday work experience as a board member/superintendent?
(8) What first steps do we need to take to make these ideas/dreams a reality?
What steps do we need to take to help with those things you wish had worked better?
(9) What things can the board do to help with these steps?
(10) What additional comments or observations would you like to make about this past year?

Comparing this format with the commonly-used 4/5-D format, we can see that the 'Review' and 'Analyze' stages correspond to 'Discovery', element (7) of 'Plan' kind of fills in for the 'Dream' stage, step (8) parallels parts of 'Design', and step (9) is like the 'Requests' element which often comes into the early part of 'Delivery'/'Destiny'.

As this is a review process, the questions are mostly Discovery-oriented, but you could easily add a few more elements to the 'Plan' stage to put additional 'Dreaming' creativity and also more structured planning into the process, or adapt it to any application of AI.

One thing I like about this model is its simplicity, and another is that it's expressed in terms that won't frighten businesses and bureaucracies. Sadly, some of the more academic and, for want of a better word, 'dreamy' terminology of AI can alienate people in some work cultures, or at least this is what I sometimes see claimed.

For example, at one establishment that we facilitated an AI summit for recently, our client contact asked us to rename the 'Dream' stage as she thought her staff were too cynical to go for it. We agreed on 'Ideal Vision' instead, so as not to provide participants - who may be understandably reluctant to engage in this mysterious process until they start to see it working - with gratuitous excuses not to get involved.

'Review, Analyze, Plan' on the other hand is not going to raise the hackles of even the most hard-nosed business audience. So thanks Deb!

How to generate 'word clouds' from the output from AI events

Wordle.net is a free web-based application that generates 'word clouds' from whatever text you paste into it. That makes it great for creating a quick visual summary of the themes, values, wishes etc that come out of an AI summit.

You can change the colour, font, background and layout until you find one you like. You can also limit the number of words and screen out common words like 'the' - in a variety of languages.

The most frequently used words appear largest in the cloud. It also gives you a handy word count which ranks words by frequency and tells you how many times they occur.

Here's an example generated from an article on the Positive Engagement blog about the 'Wholeness Principle' and limited to the top 30 words:  http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/3602489/Positive_Principle_2_%2830_words%29

The original article is at http://positive-engagement.squarespace.com/blog/2011/2/28/emergent-principles-of-appreciative-inquiry-1-the-wholeness.html

The random arrangement of words can often trigger new ideas as well!

Thanks to Steven Houghton-Burnett and Lucy Herrett (enthusiastic participants in the last Practical AI facilitator training, and all-round good people) for putting me on to this!

New Practical Appreciative Inquiry course dates announced - in London and Manchester!

We've decided to stick our necks out in the current economic climate and put a course on in London! It's on October 27-28 and will be at the Chartered Institute of Housing, WC1.

We're also running another course in Manchester on September 12-13 - venue TBC in the centre of town.

This time, you can get a big early booking discount if you book before 30 June!

 I really enjoyed the practical nature of the course and felt that experiencing and discovering the AI process really worked well for me."

~ Kate Hargreaves, Coach, Trainer and Facilitator at the Clear Thinking Partnership Ltd.

Full details and how to secure your place here: Practical Appreciative Inquiry facilitator training in London and Manchester

Free Appreciative Inquiry resources on the web

Prof David Cooperrider - image from ovationnet.comThere is quite a lot of useful free information about Appreciative Inquiry on the web, so here's a roundup of some ways you can learn more about AI for no cash outlay. Of course, to really get AI you have to experience it and get some hands-on learning at something like our Practical Appreciative Inquiry facilitator training... and finding out as much as you can about AI before you come on a course is also a very useful thing to do.

The Appreciative Inquiry Commons
This is the one everyone knows about - a vast repository of case studies, articles, PowerPoint slides and links about Appreciative Inquiry. To the complete novice in Appreciative Inquiry, it can be a bit bewildering, and you may wonder "where do I start?"

What is Appreciative Inquiry?
One excellent place to start is our intro page (also downloadable as a PDF document).

Free webinar by Professor David Cooperrider
This is a one-off - happening on March 11 2011 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EST (I think this is 5pm UK time). 

'Come join David Cooperrider, the founder of Appreciative Inquiry, as he shares his cutting-edge work to help advance the newest form of OD called "Innovation-Inspired Positive Organizational Development" (iPOD)' (Oh dear!) 

Free book - Locating the Energy for Change: An Introduction to Appreciative Inquiry
This 288-page book by Charles Elliott, Dean of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, is a decent, substantial work, downloadable from the website of the International Institute for Sustainable Development. They have other free AI resources too. 

Join the Appreciative Inquiry Discussion List
An online community of AI practitioners that you can join for free. 

Free downloads from Diana Whitney and Amanda Trosten-Bloom
The Corporation for Positive Change site has a wealth of audio and video recordings, articles, workshop materials, and book excerpts. 

AI Practitioner and AI Research Notes articles
Free articles from AI Practitioner magazine, and AI Research notes. 

Articles by Gervase Bushe
Perhaps the most thoughtful and original of writers on AI - not afraid to challenge accepted wisdom. 

Appreciative Inquiry Blogs
The latest postings from various blogs about Appreciative Inquiry, conveniently brought together in one place. 

Emergent principles of Appreciative Inquiry 1: The Wholeness Principle

Image from NASA via Wikimedia Commons

As well as the five original principles of Appreciative Inquiry (the Constructionist, Poetic, Simultaneity, Anticipatory, and Positive principles) set out by David Cooperrider, other principles have started to emerge in the light of new thinking and the practical experience of Appreciative Inquiry consultants.

I should add that from a personal point of view, being a big-picture kind of person, I prefer simplicity and elegance in the models I use. In some ways, notably with respect to spreading the word about Appreciative Inquiry to people who aren't academics or management consultants (in other words, the vast majority, but also the people you have to engage to make Appreciative Inquiry actually work), even five principles might be one too many. 

We need to beware of 'principle creep' in AI. Every new principle that's added, especially those with names that are impenetrable at first sight, is an additional impediment to explaining AI to the lay person. There is also a risk that it overlaps with one or more of the existing principles, introducing extra complications - whatever additional richness it also brings to the AI field.

However, I think the three 'emergent' principles proposed by Diana Whitney and Amanda Trosten-Bloom in their book The Power of Appreciative Inquiry: A Practical Guide To Positive Change bring enough value, and are sufficiently different from the original five, to be worth knowing about.

We'll look at the other two principles in detail in subsequent articles - so what is the Wholeness Principle about? This is my understanding, based on the principle as outlined in the book in the light of my experience of using Appreciative Inquiry.

The Whole Story

A story is a narrative of how an event or series of events unfold through time, told from a particular viewpoint. Stories are how we make sense of the world; the meaning of each event as it happens is evaluated in the light of what has happened before (the 'backstory') and in the light of our expectations of what will or 'should' happen next.

It can be very tempting to think that the story we are narrating to ourselves is the whole truth; all the more so when our colleagues, friends or work culture are transmitting and reinforcing the same story. In fact, because any story comes from a particular viewpoint which embodies particular beliefs, values and associations, "the whole story is never a singular story. It is often a synthesis, a compilation of multiple stories, shared and woven together by the many people involved" (The Power of Appreciative Inquiry)

In the Discovery stage of an Appreciative Inquiry process, as participants undertake Appreciative Interviews with another person in a different role, at a different level, or working in a different team or organisation, they necessarily hear different stories. These give different viewpoints, and a different version of the truth. In hearing these, the interviewer comes to realise that the truth is more complex, deeper and richer than previously assumed, and comes to a deeper understanding and connection with the person telling the story.

The whole system in the room

In an Appreciative Inquiry session we aim to have 'the whole system in the room' - everyone responsible for or affected by a change, or at least representatives of each group of stakeholders.

This is a departure from traditional methods of change, where senior management and perhaps some external consultants would decide what the changes should be. If they consider at all how their proposed changes would impact others, they would necessarily be doing it from the outside. At best, they would imagine themselves in the shoes of employees, customers, and other stakeholders, but it would be a very lucky guess if they could fully imagine the perspectives of people in these other groups. Much more likely they would carry over some of their own assumptions, because those will seem part of the fabric of how things are.

An illustration of how assumptions shape the way we see the world: researching their book "Unjust Rewards: Exposing Greed and Inequality in Britain Today", Polly Toynbee and David Walker assembled a group of top-flight lawyers and merchant bankers in 2007. When asked how much it would take to put someone in the top 10% of earners, they came up with the figure of £162,000 - in fact, at that time, the true figure was less than a quarter of that at £39,000. When asked about the poverty threshold, they put it at £22,000 - which was actually just under median earnings, "which meant they regarded ordinary wages as poverty pay".

When you have 'the whole system in the room', the diverse viewpoints expressed lead to greater understanding between participants and better, more robust decisions. Major flaws in proposed solutions which may be invisible from a senior management perspective are often obvious to the front-line staff and customers who have to make them work. New possibilities emerge from the creative fusion of ideas as we make sense of new information and try out different viewpoints.

Also, a 'whole system' approach encourages trust, a break-down in 'them and us' thinking ('they' are real human beings, sitting next to you, listening to your story and telling you theirs), and a can-do attitude. As a workshop participant quoted in The Power of Appreciative Inquiry says:

"Wholeness evokes trust.  When everyone is there you don't have to feel suspicious about what the others will do - there are no others. It is collectively empowering. There is no one else who must approve your plan. You know that whatever you collectively decide can be done."

 
Some questions you may want to consider in the light of this principle:

• Who else do I need to involve?
• Who will be affected by proposed changes?
• Whose opinion do I need to seek?
• Where am I making assumptions, and how would I know if they weren't correct?

How to use Appreciative Inquiry to tackle 'dull' topics

Appreciative Inquiry is unrivalled in my experience as a way of engaging people in change. You can feel the atmosphere in a group change within moments of starting a round of appreciative interviews, as if people were waking up from their normal 'working trance' and suddenly giving the whole of their attention to the person they are working with and the task in hand.

An engaging, exciting topic for the Appreciative Inquiry process certainly helps. If people are inquiring into something that catches their imagination and that matters to them, it's going to be easy for them to engage with the process.

But not all needed changes are inherently exciting. Many business processes, necessary as they are, do not in themselves make the heart beat faster. How can we use AI to stimulate generative thinking about topics that are hard to engage with emotionally?

Recently I was facilitating an AI session at a women's prison, around the topic of improving the prison's drug dispensing regime. The benefits of improvement would be substantial, as the dispensing process took several hours every day - time which the security staff and healthcare workers could certainly use better elsewhere. But the process itself - routine, repetitive, and mostly maintaining the prisoners' medication at current levels rather than leading to any improvements in their health - was not an inspiring topic to contemplate.

So, what to use as a topic for the initial appreciative interviews? As any AI facilitator knows, the appreciative interview is the heart of Appreciative Inquiry, building understanding between people with different roles (in this case, healthcare and security officers interviewing each other) and generating a positive, creative mindset from which to come up with improvements - so it's important to get it right.

Very briefly, I thought of asking people to find out their interview partner's best experience of the current dispensing regime. Dismissing that idea as uninspiring, perhaps we could do something with their best experience of being involved in a change of procedures? No - still too dull.

What I asked them to start with was their best experiences of working at the prison. Some amazing and inspiring stories emerged, and twenty minutes later the room was buzzing and people had opened up to their interview partners. 

From this opening conversation about a quite general topic, the group was now in the right emotional state, and enough bridges had been built between the normally somewhat separate perspectives of healthcare and security staff, that they could give their full attention to the specifics of what was working in the current regime and come up with creative ideas about how it could be changed.

So - if you want to use AI to change some quite detailed and on the surface unengaging procedure, it's a good idea to start with something more general, that everyone has had some significant experiences of, and that everyone can tell some emotionally resonant stories about.

Appreciative Inquiry Principles: 5. The Positive Principle

Changing the way we work is not easy. It requires us to learn new ways of doing things and new ways of communicating with each other. At the same time, most people find change stressful. The more fundamental the change, the more stressful it potentially feels.

 

The problem is that people cannot learn when they are stressed. The more radical the change, the greater the need to learn new ways of working, but the harder it is to learn. Consequently many, perhaps most, large-scale change initiatives fail, not because of failings in business process redesign, but because people are not willing, or find it impossible, to get behind the change.

 

To counteract this paradox, successful change requires high levels of positive emotion and social bonding, which tend to improve our capabilities and performance. Psychology researchers like Barbara Fredrickson and Alice Isen have discovered that positive emotions have bottom-line benefits, because they improve our capabilities. When we feel good we can think more strategically, absorb information quicker, we are more creative, we reach decisions faster, we recover more quickly from setbacks, and even our health improves (thse findings are summarised in an accessible article at http://www.unc.edu/peplab/publications/value.pdf). 

 

More research, quoted in The New Leaders by Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee, finds that a positive 'emotional climate' in the workplace improves productivity, the customer experience, and even patient mortality statistics in hospitals.

 

So how do we make change less stressful and engender a positive emotional climate? How do we ensure that the way we manage, the way we involve people in change, and even the information-gathering process fosters engagement and a good feeling about change, helping people to get into a better state to learn and create new ways of working?

 

Right from the start, we should be asking questions which focus on the positive - on achievements we are proud of, best practices, and best experiences.  This will tend to generate the positive affect needed for best performance, persistence, learning, and resilience to setbacks.

Appreciative Inquiry principles: 4. The Anticipatory Principle

Sunflower by ak_nemati at sxc.huOrganisations (and people) tend to grow in the direction of their positive images of the future, like a sunflower or heliotrope grows towards the sun. Our expectations of the future - and therefore of what we believe is possible - are constantly shaped by our conversations.

Repeated studies in sports psychology have shown that athletes who mentally rehearse success do better than those who don't have a clear image of success, or who psych themselves out by imagining all the things that could go wrong.

Having a clear, compelling image of the desired future creates "towards" motivation. Of course, we also tend to move away from our fears and bad experiences. Moving "towards" what we want has some significant advantages over moving "away from" what we don't want.

"Towards" and "Away-From" motivation contrasted:

If we know where we want to get to, we can correct our aim if circumstances knock us off course. "Away from", by contrast, is not a direction and does not give us that "inner rudder". If our main motivation for acting is to escape from unfavourable situations, we may end up further away from where we would really like to be.

"Away from" motivation leads to inconsistent results. If our motivation is 100% "away from", it gets weaker the further away we get from what we are trying to escape from. After we are clear of the undesirable situation, we may have no motivation at all until the next crisis comes along. You may have worked in teams characterised by a reactive, "headless chicken" way of working, always fire-fighting some new crisis.

"Towards" motivation, on the other hand, stays constant and may even get stronger the nearer we get to our compelling goal.

Finally, "away from" motivation is stressful, because our thinking and conversation is dominated by the unpleasant situations or possible outcomes that we want to escape. The more motivated we are, the more stressed we feel. "Towards" motivation, by contrast, engenders positive emotions, because we are thinking and talking about where we want to get to. Even if our objective circumstances are unpleasant, our intersubjective reality, focused on our desired futures and the evidence in the present of that future beginning to happen, will produce uplifting emotions like hope, gratitude and excitement - which will lead to better results (see the research referenced in the next section).

It therefore makes sense to look for and talk about what is already working well and where we want to get to in the future.

Appreciative Inquiry Principles: 3.The Simultaneity Principle

"It is not so much, “is my question leading to right or wrong answers?” but rather “What effect is my question having on our lives together... Is it strengthening our relationships?”

David L Cooperrider, Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change

The traditional sequence of activity in organisational change goes: gather information, analyse it, prescribe an intervention, and implement it. Underlying this process is the assumption that we can observe a system without affecting it.

But - if patterns of human organisation are not dictated by our genes or determined by the physical world, but instead are socially constructed in the context of relationships and communication, the questions we ask become another input into the socially constructed system.  They have effects on the listener, putting certain ideas and images in their mind and excluding others, and directing their attention along certain avenues of enquiry while closing off others. The enquirer or ‘analyst’ is also influenced by the ‘frames’ set up by the questions. 

This is not just a conscious-mind process. Through the psychological effect known as 'priming', the associations evoked at an unconscious level by words, images,  or concepts influence our thought patterns, our behaviour, and even our abilities. So, for example, being asked or reminded about money tends to make people act more selfishly, and - in an example widely known since it was quoted in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink - African-Americans tend to perform worse on intelligence tests if a question about ethnicity is included.

It's not just person being questioned who is affected by the ‘frames’ set up by the questions. The enquirer or ‘analyst’ is also influenced, particularly if they have not reflected on the assumptions that shape their inquiry.

For example, a director might decide to gather information about problematic stress levels in her company by commissioning a stress audit. Everyone in the company fills out a questionnaire, and some are interviewed, about sources of stress, bringing the subject to the forefront of their attention. “Actually”, they think, “this is quite a stressful place to work!”

Stress levels actually rise as a result of the survey, particularly as the workforce are suspicious of the management’s intentions (based on their past experience). Is the survey really anonymous? Will my comments about the stressors in my department enable the response to be traced back to me? 

The stress audit naturally raises expectations among the staff that the employer will do something about stress levels. If the employer chooses not to, the intervention now gives them another problem as well. Under UK health and safety law, employers have a duty of care which requires them to not expose their employees to undue stress levels. The company cannot claim that they were unaware of the stress levels, because they have conducted the stress audit.

The way that we ask the questions also has an effect, because the interviewees interpret the meaning of the questions in the context of the non-verbal information or 'paralanguage' that they can pick up. This would include the manner of the interviewer in face-to-face interviews - is it brusque, sympathetic, apparently just 'ticking boxes', or (ideally) interested and 'fully present'? It also includes the metaphorical 'tone of voice' of both live interviews and written questionnaires - how the questions are phrased, and how the interview process is introduced to the workforce.

Inevitably, the people being interviewed will evaluate the real meaning of the information-gathering process against the backdrop of these factors. They will also try to divine the 'real' intention of the diagnostic process. Are the interviews designed to help us? Are we being checked up on? Is it a prelude to deciding which of us to let go? How much can we trust the interviewers? How the interviews are framed will make a tremendous difference to how they are perceived, how  cooperative the interviewees will be, and the quality of the information that you get back.

The final piece in the jigsaw of how people judge the interviewing process will be the conversations they have with their fellow workers about it. This will tend to consolidate first impressions. If expectations have been badly managed, so that people are anticipating a hostile interview, it will be an uphill struggle to overturn that perception. Even if the actual interviews turn out to be pleasant, useful and sympathetic, they will be evaluated and discussed in the light of prior expectations.

So in human relationships, as in science, the observer is not separate from the system being observed. As soon as you ask a question it has an effect - big or small and often unpredictable - on the system being studied. The inquiry is already the intervention.

Therefore, as Professor Cooperrider points out, we need to think about not just the relevance and accuracy of the answers we get, but also the effect of the questioning process itself on the way the interviewees see the world, and on our relationships with them.

Some questions to ask yourself (in a way that strengthens your relationship with yourself, of course):

• What questions am I asking? How am I asking them?
• What is the effect of the questions on our relationship?
• In what directions are they directing people's attention? How useful is this?
• Bearing in mind that any inquiry is already an intervention, what is the most useful I could ask at this time?