Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative Inquiry is a technique which aims to uncover the best things about the organisation or team being explored. This enables good practice to be replicated else where. The technique is based on dialogue – collecting people’s stories about things that went well by asking encouraging questions.

Advantages

Builds upon an organisation/group’s strengths
Celebrates things that are done well and so can have very positive influence on morale, confidence and esteem of individuals and groups.
Participants can become energised and motivated because they feel valued and appreciated.
Can be easy to include people who don’t usually take part in this kind of activity because of the conversational style of questioning.

Disadvantages

Can be time-consuming.
Might not work if you need to involve all key stakeholders – the method itself doesn’t pay much attention to who is involved
Need a motivated core groups to involve lots of people.
Sometimes work needs to be done to get people out of the SWOT (strengths weaknesses, opportunities threat) mindset.

When to use

When you want to energise a depressed community or organisation
In partnership development to find out if partners share common values
When there is willingness in the organisation that a different approach to understanding and change would be appropriate.

Appreciative inquiry is as much a philosophy and mindset as a methodology. It is a continuous learning process which seeks to understand a situation by discovering the positives, rather than looking for the problems or deficits. The deficit mode of thinking has become the dominant way of thinking applied to organisational development. Appreciative inquiry runs counter to this and holds organisations to be affirmative systems created by humankind as solutions to problems. Appreciative inquiry is a means of uncovering or recovering what is good in organisations or teams and uses the resultant information to imagine, design and deliver a change.

There are four key stages in the inquiry process.

To discover – appreciating and valuing the best of what already exists.
To dream – envisioning what might be.
To design – use the information/stories gathered to work out what things should be like.
To deliver- to innovate and organise to capture the best ways of organising in the future.

Although there is no one way to do appreciative inquiry the following gives an idea of how it might work in practice.

The process relies on a core group of individuals from the organisation or team, committed to the process and a facilitator who then trains the group as researchers.
The core groups then (using their knowledge of the organisation) design questions which will tease out positive stories, core values and what works well.
The group then spend time having conversations (using the questions drafted in 2 as part of these conversations with people from across the organisation collecting evidence.
The core group then reviews the information collected and uses this to design improvements which capture the positive aspects identified by those questioned. It is important that the language and values of those who had been spoken to is used in any proposals, to reinforce ownership.
The proposal using the information gathered is fed back so any adjustments can be made.

Example

Although the appreciative inquiry technique might seem unsuited to local government. It has been used in a local authority context by Ryedale strategic partnership in developing their community strategy. The exercise was branded ‘Imagine Ryedale’ and involved engaging a wide range of individuals and groups across Ryedale through adopting a process called ‘Imagine’. This approach helped identify what residents’ priorities were for creating and maintaining a sustainable community.

‘Imagine is a community participation method based on an approach used in the USA called ‘Appreciative Inquiry’. It builds a vision for the future using questions to focus people’s attention on success. The questions are designed to encourage people to tell stories from their own experience of what works. By seeing what works and exploring why, it is possible to imagine and construct further success, ensuring that a vision of the future is created with a firm basis in reality.’

A dozen community activists and council officers were trained in using appreciative questions to identify what people’s most cherished values were. Using the process identified above scripts of over four hundred conversations (some face to face, others in meetings and some via a specially set up phone line) were gathered and used to draft the community strategy. Participants were given a chance to comment on the draft version before the community plan was finalised.

For more information see the following link.

http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/intro/default.cfm