A question to amplify positive emotion

“How does it feel to realise that?” is a great question to ask in an appreciative interview whenever someone tells you about some ‘lightbulb moment’ or a time when they made a real difference.

This week I was facilitating an Appreciative Inquiry session for Dreamcatchers, a small charity that does solution-focused youth work, to help them clarify their ‘brand’ and how to communicate it to various stakeholders (more about how to use Appreciative Inquiry in branding in a future posting).

The management team were deeply into appreciative interviews (using a variation on the ’standard’ appreciative interview questions) when a late-comer arrived – so I stepped in to conduct his interview myself. As often happens, it took him a while to warm up to the question “What has been the best experience of working in the Dreamcatchers?”  At first he came out with a fairly generic answer about making a difference to people’s lives. In fact we had completed the interview sheet when he said “I’ve just thought of another one.”

He went on to tell me about a presentation he and a colleague had done about guns, gangs and girls in gangs – a girl who saw the presentation had come up to him months later and said that it had saved her from joining the gang she had been on the fringes of, and helped her to straighten out her life. He realised more fully than before that the work he was doing really made a difference to people’s lives, possibly saving that girl’s life and maybe – through her example – having a positive influence on the lives of other girls that he’d never even met.

So I asked him, “How does it feel to realise that?” What does this question do? Firstly, it encourages the interviewee to become aware of how they feel about the realisation. It amplifies positive emotions – which, following the Positive Principle and Barbara Fredrickson’s ‘Broaden and Build’ theory, make an individual more effective and are vital for positive organisational change. Secondly, the enhanced emotion will tend to make the memory of the realisation more vivid and easier to recall in future, so it becomes a reference experience that strengthens the individual’s self-concept and identity, helping them to be more motivated in their role.

I originally came across this question in NLP, where it is used in therapy or coaching to help a client ‘lock in’ a breakthrough or realisation and prevent them from forgetting it and slipping back into the pre-breakthrough state.

Naturally, since the question explicitly asks the person to focus on their feelings, you would only ask it about ‘positive’ events and realisations.

Interview with David Cooperrider: exceptionality, essentiality and equality

Dr David Cooperrider is the originator of the Appreciative Inquiry method. In this interview with Jennifer Salopek he talks about how AI started and sets out the AI philosophy in clear and easily-understood terms:

Appreciative Inquiry at 20: Questioning David Cooperrider

Appreciative inquiry addresses three fundamental facts about human beings: exceptionality, essentiality, and equality.

Exceptionality means that all of us are exceptions to the rule. No two human beings are exactly alike. Appreciative inquiry tries to measure each person’s uniqueness, and people resonate and respond to that. Management methods that see people as interchangeable cogs create resistance to change.

Essentiality refers to everyone’s need to feel needed-to feel essential, but not central. We like to feel that we would be missed. Unfortunately, a recent Gallup poll found that only 20 percent of employees believe that their company knows and values their strengths.

Equality means that we each want to share our voices. People must feel that they have a right and a responsibility to lift up their visions of a better world.

Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

This is a TED talk by creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson, in which he calls for a radical rethink of our education system to nurture rather than undermine creativity. From www.ted.com.

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.

Appreciative Feedback Form

Have you ever wondered how you could use the 4-D appreciative inquiry format for gathering feedback? This is a draft of what we will be sending out to people who have completed our courses.

One of the virtues of making the 4-D structure explicit in the form is that it acts as another reminder for the students.

Feel free to adapt the questions to your own needs.
————-
Now that you have had some time to reflect on and use what you learned on
the Practical Appreciative Inquiry facilitator training, it may be the
appropriate time to ask for some feedback. We are road-testing a 4-D
feedback request structure – feel free to copy or adapt it if it works for
you:

1. Discovery
What did you appreciate about the course? What were the best aspects for
you?

2. Dream
What would the course have been like in an ideal world?

3. Design
What practical changes could we make to the course to make it better?

4. Delivery
How have you been using the Appreciative Inquiry methods you learned on the
course? What are you doing differently now?

———–
Let us know what you think!

Appreciative Inquiry Facilitator Training

Our first Practical Appreciative Inquiry facilitator training in London went even better than expected. The venue (Euston Thistle Hotel) was extremely conveniently located and well up to scratch, the participants were keen and asked great questions, and Tim Luckcock and I worked together better than ever before as the facilitation team.

Don’t take our word for it though – here are some of the participants’ ‘Wows’ from the course :

Has really helped with my ability to coach

Great handout book – facilitators knowledgeable and experienced – lots of time for practical application

Tim’s ability to help clarify complex issues in small group exercises

Excellent workbooks

Loved it thank you

My aim for the course have been met. I’m going away with a working knowledge of AI

Good open discussions and shared experiences

The approach was simple and focused on practical applications of AI

Well planned – v practical – something I can take away and use

The next course is in Manchester on 10-11 February 2009. You can see what’s in the course, and download the form to book your place, here:

Practical Appreciative Inquiry facilitator training

Appreciative Interview Format

This is a typical format that we use for Appreciative Interviews. It’s four simple questions and might take 20-40 minutes, depending how much depth you go into.

The aim of the appreciative interview is to unearth stories of times when things went exceptionally well – times which are often overlooked in the rush to identify and solve problems.

By reminding ourselves of what is important about these peak experiences, we have a clearer idea about what we want to do more of in the future. We also start to feel better about our work, our organisation, our team, and ourselves.

You can modify these ‘generic’ questions according to the subject of your appreciative inquiry. Here they are:

1. What has been your best experience of your professional life – a time when you felt most alive, most engaged, and proud of yourself and your work?
2. What’s really important about this experience? What do you value most about it?
3. What do you value most about your work?
4. Without being humble, what do you value most about yourself and the way that you do your work?

Remember, you are after stories and the motivating emotions they evoke, rather than detached conceptual analysis.

We find that the ‘what do you value most about yourself’ question works best after the other three – tradionally modest Brits (and this is probably true of Aussies and Kiwis too) might feel inhibited if they were asked to blow their own trumpets with no warm-up! Maybe in the US it would be easier…

Barbara Fredrickson on positivity

Positive psychology guru Barbara Fredrickson has posted an interesting article on the value of positive emotions in the light of the Obama victory:
Keep Stoking the Positivity — Our Future Depends On It

…We need positivity, the complex web of causes and consequences of positive emotions, now more than ever. Not just to sugarcoat bitter news or distract us from gloom. We need positivity because we’re different people when we’re under its influence.

Pleasant emotions like hope, inspiration, joy, and well-earned pride literally open us. As the blinders of negativity fall away, we take in more of what surrounds us. We see both the forest and the trees. We appreciate the oneness that binds us instead of the barriers that divide us. Even race becomes irrelevant.

But that’s not the half of it. Positivity’s mental openness fertilizes just the sort of creative and integrative thinking that hard-to-find solutions and compromises are made of. With the throng of problems facing our nation and our new president, we sorely need this expansive thinking. In addition, when we think broadly we discover and build new skills, new alliances, and new resilience – which make us better prepared to handle future adversity. Even mild positive emotions, experienced regularly, set people on discernable trajectories of growth, making them better off next season than they are today….

What Appreciative Interviewers need to understand

Belief, rather than doubt, is the proper stance. This is not a time for skepticism or for questions that imply a need for “proof”.

- Jane Magruder Watkins and Bernard J Mohr,
Appreciative Inquiry: Change at the Speed of Imagination

1. Assume vitality and health, rather than ‘deficit’.
You are looking for incidents and examples of things at their best.

2. The inquiry is the intervention.
You are not just gathering data. The questions you ask impact the emotional state of the interviewee and the ongoing, ever-changing image they have of the  organisation and the change process.

3. It’s not just the questions, it’s how you ask them.
The non-verbal elements of your communication (voice tone, body language, the surroundings in which you do the interview) form a “meta-message” which influences people’s emotional state and shapes their expectations about the value and genuineness of the exercise.

When you are genuinely focused and interested, the interviewee will experience being fully heard and understood, and empathy will develop rapidly.

4. You are after stories, not opinions or analysis.
You want the interviewee to be reliving the experiences they are talking about and telling you what they thought and felt at the time, rather than examining them in a detached way and telling you what they think about them now. This way, you will get genuine rapport and trust develops, and you will get genuine experiences rather than the “official line” or what the interviewee thinks you want to hear.

5. Once you have the story, you can move on to values, life-giving factors and wishes.
The motivating power of values and wishes comes from their emotional charge. The emotions that the interviewees’ stories awake in them will enable them to identify what is really important about those experiences, and what they want for the future.

Business Benefits of Strengths based Change

Appreciative  Inquiry is a great example of strengths based change, and its positive focus is one of the keys to the energy and commitment it creates. But of course, it’s not the only example of positive psychology that’s growing in popularity around the globe.

Ever since Marcus Buckingham’s book “First, Break All The Rules” highlighted the business benefits of identifying and maximising talents and strengths, increasingly organisations are thinking differently about how we recruit, manage and develop people at work. In fact, there’s lots of applications of the strengths based theory. But why are hard nosed HR Directors and Business Leaders interested in something that seems to be rather fluffy on a cursory first glance?

Well, the Centre for Positive Psychology highlights a number of things that strengths based change helps to do in organisations today. Here are a few to chew over:

• A strengths based approach often taps into the talents that people have, but don’t use at work. So in effect, we bring more of ourselves into work. How much of your natural strengths do you use every day at work?
• Helps us to attract and keep people. We all like to do the things we’re good at, and the success we achieve reinforces the good performance, so we enjoy our job. And we want to do more of it, and get more of the buzz. Happy employee, happy boss!
• As we get the reinforcement of success, so our performance improves. Why should we waste our time and energy trying to develop the skills that we haven’t got, when the positive performance and feedback  is possible through a virtuous circle via focusing on strengths?
• Employee are more engaged and deliver more discretionary effort, improved performance, customer satisfaction and ultimately business growth. A focus on strengths significantly aids personal engagement to the job and task in hand, and this delivers results.
• Drives flexibility in the workforce by harnessing a future focus on what someone can do (based on their strengths and possibilities) rather than what they have done (based on their role or task history). Asking someone to take on a new role or responsibilities - but something that they realise that they like and can excel at – is likely to ease the path along the change curve considerably.

Of course, we believe at ai-consulting.co.ukthat appreciative inquiry as a huge role to play in strengths based change as part of a package of measures. There’s a lot of sceptics out there, though, and in future blogs, we’ll look at more business benefits and how we can introduce ai and strengths based change painlessly!

Paul Nicholson

Chartered Occupational Psychologist, AI Consulting.

Appreciative Inquiry postings on the Practical EQ blog

There are some earlier blog entries about Appreciative Inquiry on Andy Smith’s Practical EQ blog (look for ‘Appreciative Inquiry’ in the categories), including an introduction to Appreciative Inquiry and applying AI to the NLP SCORE model.