Appreciative Inquiry: how it contributes to Design Thinking?

On organizational environment, we focus on solving problems. Our mind is already trained to do it and routinely, the organizations investigate on the reasons that lead a problem to occur. In general, as collaborators, we tend to anticipate what can go wrong in order create action plans. We analyze the scenario and for as much as we search for opportunities, we are automatically pushed to think “what if it goes wrong?”

Not only in companies, but also in our lives, we are continuously running up and down to extinguish fires. What if we stop acting like this, especially in the corporative field, and change the wheel to start emphasizing the positive side of a project, in an area, of all the company or from a group of stakeholders (including you)? This is exactly what Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is about.

What is Appreciative Inquiry?

Most of organizations make an investigation when something goes wrong, but they rarely have a more structured approach to investigate the reasons about why someone is successful on their task. The Appreciative Inquiry first appearance was in 1980, extracted from a doctoral thesis by David Cooperrider, it eliminates the traditional methods centered on the problem and tries to identify past achievements and existing strengths.

Here, try to visualize that instead of identifying what is going wrong, the negative side and criticism, when one applies Appreciative Inquiry, he aims to explores the positive aspects. Therefore, AI represents a paradigm change on the organizational environment, because our mind, trained to search and solve problems, must learn to view our surroundings as a place full of opportunities to be explored.

Thus, AI is in summary, a change methodology that support leaders and managers to achieve a better performance. Besides the self-development, the practice of AI is also recommended to the management of risk and change.

How AI works?

Appreciative Inquiry starting point is that what the organization is searching for is already within it. As Cooperrider pointed “the idea is that organizations evolve to their most positive images of themselves.” Rather than ask ourselves what is going wrong, the right question should be “what is possible?”

As the name suggests, on AI, the action verb is inquiry. Hence, in order to apply it, one should perform positive questioning that anticipate positive potentials and come up with achievements, values and successful moments. Generally, Appreciative Inquiry is applied by the human resources department, but it can be also conducted by a trained leader.

Currently, the organizations adopt AI in order to discover organizational believes about values, practices and shared objectives that will serve as input to the design of new product, service or experience. Therefore, the methodology can be applied in a range of areas, including strategic planning, innovation and conflict resolution.

The goal is to find what Cooperrider defined as Positive Core, be in the organization as a whole or in the leadership, on projects or in a specific area.

Discovering the Positive Change Core: “4-D” Cycle

In order to find the Positive Change Core, one must apply the “4-D” cycle which divided in four steps:

●     Discovery: every organization has a positive change core that needs to be discovered. At this stage, it tries to investigate the organizational success by asking the participants to remember their achievements and to focus on their values and qualities. It is important to notice that instead of thinking about failures and defeats, the participants verbalize their qualities and work with the positive aspects of their past experiences. The focus, at this stage, it is also to remember organizational successes;

●     Dream: at this step, the participants visualize the ideal and positive future to the current system. Through AI, it is believed that this practice helps the idealized future to be felt on the present, extracting, thus, the most positive aspects of the organizations.

●     Design: after the identification of the positive change core and the visualization of the ideal future, comes the planning stage. In this step, the keypoint is to come up with change actions in order to achieve the visualized future from the Dream step. Although, it is important to consider that the organizational changes may occur on different levels in the organization.

●     Destiny: this is conclusion phase and, at the same time, the beginning of an “appreciative learning culture”. It is time for hands on and hard work, because the participants start to take actions in order to meet the visualized ideal future.

Applying Appreciative Inquiry on Design Thinking

Design Thinking works with the development of projects based on the same cognitive process used by designers: research, brainstorm, ideation, prototyping and tests.

Through the AI methodology, instead of the Design Thinking process focusing on solving problems, it applies meaningful conversations with the aim to promote positive actions.

Thus, with a more positive view of the future, it becomes easier to find innovative ways to solve complex questions and, also, to deal with organizational criticism. This occurs because AI engages, motivates and values the collaboration, as does Design Thinking.

In order to apply Appreciative Inquiry in the process of Design Thinking, one must cover the 4-D cycle steps, bearing in mind the questions posed to the participants should have a positive approach and set aside the problem-centered view. Note, the focus is always on the strength, never on the weakness.

Conclusion

As addressed at Cooperrider website, the AI:

●     Focuses on promoting the strengths of a organization rather than to overcome or minimize its weaknesses; 

●     Makes a conscious choice to paint the best side of an organization (its positive core);

●     It is not a bottom up nor a top down approach rather touching all levels.

 To apply AI, one can not forget to point the questions in a way that the answers bring along stories that enhance the qualities, capacities and strengths of the system being addressed (note that it can be the organization as a whole, a department, a group of people, a project or activity and so on).

 Author’s note: I hope this article has been useful for you. Feel free to share it with your friends and colleagues. I would like to hear back your insights. It would be a pleasure to develop a conversation around this topic. See you soon.

Marco Antonio da Silva