It's Great to Appriciate -Appreciative Inquiry in Large Scale Organizational Change- by Ian Mattair

Large scale organizational change is hard. For an organizational change effort to succeed, leaders must understand the state that they are in, then visualize the state they want to be in, taking into consideration the motivation and receptivity of their employees. Traditionally, when large scale change occurs, leader have concerned themselves with solving organizational problems. In fact, problem solving is a major component of any transformation. Problem solving is humanities oldest skill. According to Ron Zemke in the book, Don't fix that company, problem solving has been the core skill in organizational consulting and managing for most of this century, but one that can trap us in what is described as “the null-sum game of problem-solving”. Zemke contends that problems are better solved by focusing on positives rather than negatives. This is called Appreciative inquiry.

Professor John Hayes at Leeds University Business school has a wonderful Youtube series in which he says that the idea behind Appreciative Inquiry is to discover the best things the company does, ask why those things are done the best, then amplify those things that make them the best. Appreciative Inquiry aims to look at an organization as a positive force and to understand its strengths, and then determine how to enhance out how to refine and enhance those strengths. Of course, people have different constructs of reality, so if employees are leaving the company, don’t focus on why people are leaving, but instead focus on why they are staying.

Appreciative Inquiry has five principles. The Principle of Constructionism says that we, together as a company, create our own reality and how we perceive it. The Principle of Simultaneity states that the act of inquiry is an act of intervention, therefore the way we frame the questions will impact how we receive the answers and how we construct the future with those answers. The Poetic Principle posits that organizations must be looked at as living, social eco-systems in which the human experience is studied and celebrated. The Anticipatory Principle says that the future we anticipate is the future we create. Finally, the Positive Principle says that problems are better solved by focusing on positives rather than what is wrong. Always stay positive!

 According to Berrisford in the article, Using Appreciative Inquiry to drive change at the BBC, the Appreciative Inquiry process is designed to take a team from defining topics for positive inquiry through delivering performance-boosting change. The four main stages of the Appreciative Inquiry method are Discovery, Dream, Design and Destiny.

Discovery – This is done in an open meeting format where groups interview one another about the strengths of the company to find consensus.

Dream – When the information from the discovery phase is gathered and the positives are used as the platform to speculate on and visualize the possible futures of the company.

Design – This phase is based on the outcomes of the dream phase and includes the concepts that will form the principles that will eventually guide the company forward.

Destiny – This phase allows the stakeholders involved in the AI process to apply the principles they have arrived at together to reach the vision they share of the future.

 According to the Whitney & Trosten-Bloom book, The Power of Appreciative Inquiry: A Practical Guide to Positive Change, appreciative Inquiry works by focusing the attention of an organization on its positive core and unleashing the energy of the positive core for transformation and sustainable success. We simply need to discover and define the positive conditions that exist in other departments that have no such turnover problem and apply those positives and that knowledge to the issues of the Human Resources department.

As always, basic problem-solving skills are necessary to fixing issues and changing our processes and protocols, but it’s interesting to note Whitney & Trosten-Bloom’s take on the paradox of Appreciative Inquiry, that its goal is not to change anything, but to uncover and bring forth existing strengths, hopes, and dreams and to identify and amplify the positive core of the organization. Simply put, Appreciative Inquiry allows you to conceptualize and emphasis the positive, which leads to positive change.

Overall, it is my belief that Appreciative Inquire is simply a different approach to problem solving, if one were to classify not making enough revenue as a “problem”, which large corporations surly do. Appreciative Inquiry is a great method for standard organizational development in building a consensus on positivity, which is an absolute necessity for long term and sustainable success.