What Happens In The Dream Stage of Appreciative Inquiry?

Before we start, I want to highlight the extra time slot that's been added to the Practical Appreciative Inquiry course to accommodate participants in Asia and Australasia - it's 9am UK time! If you're in the Americas, you'll probably prefer the existing time slot of 5pm UK time - if you're in the UK or Europe, choose the one that suits you best. The course starts on 17 April - here's the info and how to book your place.

Note: this article is written from the perspective of working with teams and small groups, although it can also apply to larger-scale Appreciative Inquiry summits.

Also, you may very well be able to adapt it to whatever other approach you're using to team facilitation.

During the Dream stage, we invite participants to envisage an ideal future, in which the team is organised around its strengths and aspirations, and the exceptional experiences and life-giving energies uncovered in the Discovery phase became the norm rather than the exception.

The question we're playing with is some version of “In an ideal world, what would we want to happen in relation to this topic?” (i.e. the affirmative topic that this Appreciative Inquiry process is focusing on).

We would adapt it to fit the topic, make sense in the company culture, and so on, but that's what we're really after.

We're thinking “What would that be?like?in an ideal world?”

So we’re?not?asking, “How do we practically get there?” We’re also?not?asking, “Is it possible? Is it feasible? Is it realistic?”

We’re setting a direction. Even if we only ever get half way there, that’s still a 50% improvement on where we started from.

We’re thinking 'ideal world' - to rescue the participants from limiting their imagination and collective ambition by thinking too logically about the desired future and bringing in constraints of what they think is realistic.

Our aim in the Dream stage is for people to co-create a vision of what an ideal future could be, based on the rich data unearthed during the Discovery phase, to enable people to move forward in ways which they had not previously thought of.

So how do we do this?

Firstly, if the Dream stage follows directly on from the Discovery stage, people will still have their?Default Mode Networks ?activated, which makes it easier for them to think creatively. If the two stages are separated in time, we'd do some kind of warm up appreciative interviews and remind them of what they did in the Discovery stage, to take them back to that sense of excitement and possibility.

Secondly, rather than asking them to work on a logically argued document or set of bullet points or set of figures, we’re encouraging them to collaborate on some sort of artwork that represents the desired future - collage, theatrical skit, balloon sculpture, plasticine, Lego!

We’ve had almost every conceivable form of artistic expression in the past on these groups that I’ve run, depending on the kind of skills that people have had. There was a piano in the room one time and this guy just made a song up on the spot, there was a DJ with some mixing software on his iPad and somebody else who could rap and they just did a bit of scratching and made up a rap on the spot.

(Thanks Steven Houghton-Burnett for enjoying being part of a Dream tableau in the picture above)

There’s no limit to the type of creative expression that people can let loose in the Dream stage. They're enjoying themselves and expressing themselves and bouncing creative ideas off each other, coming up with ideas between them that none of them could have thought of on their own.

It is at this stage in most Appreciative Inquiries that people become really ‘fired up’ and enthusiastic. Ideas start to flow and even the least creative people find ways of getting their key messages across.

I want to emphasise that what we're?not?doing here is setting SMART goals, or get into the details of timings, budgets, or who does what. That comes later, in the Delivery stage.

We're asking the metaphorical question "What would it be?like?" The power of metaphor is that it's high-level and abstract, so that everyone can relate to it and feel motivated to bring it to life.

If we tried to get into the details too early of how to make the Dream happen in the real world, it could lead to disagreements over what to do, because the further down you get into details, the more there is to disagree over.

Keeping the vision metaphorical and represented in art means you get the emotional reaction that motivates people to want to make it happen, without dropping people into?Task Positive mode ?too soon.

The output from the Dream stage will be this co-created and exciting metaphorical vision of how things could be and what that would feel like.

They may also create one or more slogans or straplines that sum the Dream up in a few words and inspire people to stay on track and live up to the Dream. In Appreciative Inquiry terminology this would be called a "provocative proposition" - we'll look more deeply at these in a later section.

The power of the Dream phase is that it encourages people to use the creative side of their brains – which enables them to come up with ideas and solutions that they wouldn't have thought of in a more formal setting.

It also enables people from various levels within an organisation or community to communicate with one another on an equal basis. We’ve found it a very successful approach for community and stakeholder engagement events.

If you'd like to get started using Appreciative Inquiry confidently with teams and small groups, join the next Practical Appreciative Inquiry course - wherever you are in the world! At the time of writing you still have time to get the $100 early booking discount for the course starting April 2023.