Peggy Holman and I have just spent two days working with some amazing provincial public servants in Victoria, hosting a learning workshop on Appreciative Inquiry. There were many gems over the two days, but I think what stands out for me is the list of learnings that came after this morning. Our participants were given some homework overnight which simply consisted of interviewing someone using appreciative questions. Here are some of the rich insights that came up in the check in this morning:
- Genuine, appreciative questioning brings us together and fosters connection
- Being interviewed appreciatively open our awareness of possibility
- Appreciative questions stop us dead in our tracks – many of us have never been asked questions that invite us to tell a story of a high point in our life, or a reflection on our core strengths – and these open us to our higher selves.
- Discovery uncovers assets we never knew we had.
- When there is a clear need and a call that comes from a deep source of responding to life, people show up (given in the context of why one participant chose to give blood rather than interview someone).
- When one is emotionally closed, appreciative questions introduce possibility and in dark moments, possibility can be a shocking surprise.
- Authentic possibility is grounded in reality rather than wishful thinking.
- Curiosity changes minds better than trying to convince someone that everything will be alright. In judgment we back into relationship. Curiosity fosters sustainable relationships.
- In Quaker Clearness Committees, people are only allowed to ask questions which are genuinely curious about and to which they do not know the answer.
- The essence of discovery is that we learn something new about people or places that we thought we knew or that we take for granted.
- Appreciative learning creates a hunger for more.
- When there is conflict open more space – practices that invite mystery bring us to new paths through old patterns.
- Appreciative life is supported by a climate of openness. This is a key leadership move to getting more out of people, groups and communities.
These are terrific insights, and although some of them are not new to me, I was struck by how powerful these were coming altogether after one appreciative interview. If you want you can conduct the exercise yourself and report your insights and results here.
Simply and curiously invite a conversation with someone that invites them to tell a story of the best experiences of themselves. It is especially rich to inquire about how someone survived a dark time, inquiring about the resources they drew upon to make it through. Don’t judge what is being said, simply stay open to what you learn. You may well find out something spectacularly surprising about people you thought you knew well.
|A question to ask always is whether or not your conversation design is breeding possibility or impossibility. Are we asking questions that look at what is possible, that look at overcoming our fears, or are we looking for things that emerge out of fears.
And example of the later is when clients ask me to design conversations around proposals or presentations. It seems to happen most commonly with government clients that they want to ask a variation of a question like “What do you notice is wrong with our proposal? What are we missing?”
Now it’s not a problem to explore new ideas, but questions like this invite people to come from a place of fear and anger and negativity. Instead, seek to design conversations around naming fears and exploring ways around them. “What ideas do we need to include to strengthen this proposal? How can we mesh those ideas with what we have already proposed?”
And of course none of that precludes people from calling out a completely wrong-headed approach. But the responsibility to tank something always comes with the caveat that a better proposal should be offered so that we can move forward. –
I ran a workshop last week for the Indigenous Adult and Higher Learning Association of British Columbia. The taske was to to spend a day and a half reviewing the high level vision and direction of the organization and to come up with some streams forward to present to the organization’s membership at the AGM. In thinking about the design of the gathering, I chose to consciously use Theory U to help structure a series of exercises. I proposed a five phase process for the day:
- Sensing needs and purposes and reviewing the world outside
- Appreciative Evaluation of the organization’s path over the past five years
- Presencing the vision for the near future
- Crystallizing the intention of the emerging visions
- Harvesting forward to present to the AGM
For the first three phases I created a series of reflective exercises, based in part by some of the exercises Otto Scharmer has been using in his work. The list of questions went as follows:
Sensing
- What are the voices tapping us on the shoulder? What are the forces competing for our attention?
- What are our sources of frustration in the world?
- What are our sources of joy?
- Think of the diversity of IAHLA membership. What are they facing that is coming through you in this moment?
Each person journalled individually on these questions and then we went around the circle of six and harvested what was in the field. At the end of the exercise we had a harvest that represented an environmental scan that was presenced through the minds and hearts of each Board member.
Appreciative evaluation
- Thinking of IAHLA’s journey as a canoe trip on a river, five years ago, when IAHLA began, what caused the founders to put the canoe in the river?
- What landmarks have we passed on our journey over the past five years?
- Who has been there with us, in the boat or on the shore?
- If we imagine the journey extending through where we are now, what does our past and present say about where we are going?
- If you received news this afternoon that IAHLA’s funding were to disappear what would your initial reaction be? What would you fear for first?
In the same fashion I led the group through these questions, with each person journalling individually. The result was a harvest, drawn on the frame of a canoe journey that recorded the founder’s vision as we have inherited it, the work that we have done, a sense of where we are going, a list of people and organizations that have been instrumental in getting us there and, most interestingly from the last question, a list of what is essential. Many of the board members remarked that this exercise was powerful in that it connected the current board to the legacy of the founders and those that came before, who started the entire movement of offering this type of learning centre in Aboriginal communities. This exercise resulted in a powerful sense of stewardship for the movement.
Presencing vision
For this exercise we used a framework document that describes the work of IAHLA and captures the overall intention and purpose of the organization. Participants were invited to spend nearly an hour on a learning journey with this document, using the following questions as a guide:
- Inspired by the framework, what are three shifts in the world you can see IAHLA spearheading?
- For each of these shifts, imagine being in that changed future and note down how we might have arrived there.
- Find and circle parts of the framework that will have contributed to that shift.
The harvest from this was a fantastic conversation in which we identified eight areas of shift and some of the major strategic landmarks that would appear on those paths. In the subsequent conversation as we crystallized the intent of these directions we talked extensively about some of the priority areas, the work that might have the most impact, and that which the organization’s members might be most excited in.
We will capture these results in a large graphic harvest for the AGM, at which time we will be inviting the membership in a cafe to reflect on these eight shifts and contribute another level of collective strategic thinking to the work.
Drawing by ritwkdey
I have been thinking a lot the past few weeks about the living systems vs. the mechanical systems worldviews. It’s interesting that there is a clear distinction between these two kinds of systems – a system is alive or it isn’t, at least in this point in time – and yet the way we humans think our way through being in these systems seems to fall on a continuum.
My conversation with Myriam Laberge here has pointed this out. I initially wrote a post that put facilitating up against hosting as two words to describe different ways of working with groups within human systems. I advocated for a new way of thinking about the role of facilitation (especially as it is perceived by mainstream and unspecialized views, which describes a large number of the clients of facilitators). Myriam rightly called me out on the stark polarity of my conceptualization, seeing instead that facilitation and hosting (not the words, but the actual work that we both articulate) are on some kind of continuum of approaches to groups.
Now I’m thinking that a continuum is even too limiting a way to talk about the variety of possibilities in working with groups. Humans in relationship with each other are, after all, living systems, and as such even a group of two people can be an incredibly complex system, bouncing between high degrees of chaos and order. So there is nothing whatsoever mechanical about human beings, and therefore any approach to working with humans – and life in general, is by definition a living systems approach. Instead of a continuum, we facilitators (or hosts or whatever) simply work from a cloud of approaches, as distinct and unique as each of us are. This makes the work of facilitation difficult to describe. Some, like the International Association of Facilitators, have tried to define the field and provide certification around a specific approach, but this is by no means an exclusive definition. The variety of ways of working with people is as various as people themselves.
And so I am led instead to think about the attributes of living systems so that I might better understand effective ways of working with people. I am not breaking any radically new ground here, except in my own practice. I began my professional life of working with groups specializing in chairing meetings, which I did from a young age. As a teenager, I was involved in all kinds of groups thet met, and I chaired many of them, enjoying being a position of power and control (I mean, let’s be honest, shall we?) but growing into an enjoyment of the kinds of good things that skilful conversation can produce. I was aware from the age of 16 that the way a meeting was run could have a significant impact on its outcome.
As I grew in my practice and curiosity about this field, I discovered chaos and complexity theory and became very interested in methodologies like Open Space Technology that place this world view at its core. To me watching groups in Open Space was unlike anything I had ever seen. Large groups of people, sometimes in the hundreds, could manage an entire conference themselves with only a few simple directions, some elementary pieces of form and a question or issue for which there was real passion. Over the years, I have witnessed this experiment running literally hundreds of times, and it continues to amaze and delight.
So if Open Space really works, then what is it that makes it work? Harrison Owen has been consumed with studying self-organization for many years now, because his experience of Open Space led hm to the same conclusions – humans are living systems and they behave much more like nature than machine. There is no mechanical approach that will work with humans – witness the recent trend for instance away from Business Process Re-engineering due to the deemphasis on the human factor. What works BETTER in a living system is an appreciative approach. What if an appreciative world view was a more relevant and therefore a more generative world view for determining processes for working with humans than a world view that seeks to engineer human engagement?
As I was flying in Denver Yesterday on my way home from Phoenix, looking down on the land on final approach, a question went through my mind: How do living systems make use of resources? I was reflecting on a recent appreciative summit I facilitated last week, where I was explaining the appreciative world view as being essentially a way to understand the resources we have among us and figuring out ways of deploying or channelling them where they are needed. The brown prairie below our approach path, and the dry streams leading out of the front range of the Rocky Mountains made me aware that in living systems like the one below me, all resources go to creating life. There is no waste in a living system at all. Everything that lives, eventually dies and in death it becomes, in the words of William McDonough, nutrition for the system. The resources that exist within the system flow towards life and life itself aggregates and grows around resources, creating an ever upward spiral of living matter that is limited only by the constraints of the system itself. When a critical limit is reached, the system seeks balance. If a catastrophy strikes the systems becomes something else, an emergent self-organizing order will take place. But it never dies, for the earth itself is a living system. Even rocks, locked in statsis for millions of years eventually supply the minerals that are needed for life itself.
Resources flow where they are needed and they attract life to themselves. This is fundamental. The system acts with a kind of intelligence, but it is not control. What can we learn about this for working appreciatively with small living systems of human beings?
From a conference call this morning with friends around some big work. We spoke about the fact that the work we are in – large scale systemic change – is plagued with doubt. There is no certainty that what we are doing is the right thing, or whether it will even work. But the project itself exists in a field of doubt, and as that doubt begins to pervade our core teams, the search for certainty becomes desperate. People begin to focus on little things that are going wrong and a depreciative world view takes hold.
Doubt hunts us on the trail. It picks up our scent and dogs our heels ntil we find ourselves running faster and faster away from it. We expend our energy avoiding it and become exhausted and depleted.
In these moments what is needed is a stand. We must stop running from it, turn around on the path and face it down. We need to muster up the courage and confront the energy of doubt unless we wishe to have it erode our efforts from within.
Large scale change is never certain. Our running from the doubts simply feeds the fear of that uncertainty. IN the worse case, we become consumed by it and look outside of ourselves for confirmation that what we are doing is the right thing to do. The truth of it is that the certainty we need is not outside of us. If it is not within us, we will never find it. We must generate it in the field of our work together or abandon our work to the poisonous cynicism that wants to consume it in the end. At some point we choose to confront the predator or become its prey.