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.

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…

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.

What are Appreciative Interviews, and why use them?

What is an Appreciative Interview?

“Inquiry is intervention“- David L Cooperrider

The Appreciative Interview has been described as ‘the heart of appreciative inquiry’. It is the key activity of the Discovery stage.

Appreciative Interviews are designed to collect rich qualitative information in the form of stories which carry a wealth of meaning, and sometimes a powerful emotional charge, rather than dry quantitative data consisting of figures and statistics.

The aim is to uncover the forces which give life to the organisation.

Why Appreciative Interviews?

• Appreciative Interviews are based on an agreed “Affirmative Topic” so are implicitly positive
• Appreciative Interviews gather new information about what is already working well and contributing to the success of a given topic
• Appreciative Interviews raise people’s morale by valuing their own personal experiences and contributions, making them more open to change
• Appreciative Interviews raise the sense of what is possible in anticipation of the Dream stage
• As they tell their stories and associate into their own positive reference experiences, people are more likely to come up with fresh insights than if they are asked for abstract lists of principles.
• You can actively engage large numbers of people at all levels of the organisation as Appreciative Interviewers, helping them to internalise an appreciative mindset.

The key factor in Appreciative Interviews, I believe, is this: the assumptions and positive language built into  the questions influence both interviewee and interviewer towards a more positive state of mind.

Coming soon: What Appreciative Interviewers need to understand

Book review: Appreciative Team Building

Appreciative Team Building by Diana Whitney, Amanda Trosten-Bloom, Jay Cherney and Ron Fry

This short book (98 pages) provides an strong starting point for anyone wanting to build a more positive and productive culture in their team.

A few pages in, I found this eye-opening encapsulation of what’s wrong with the “conventional wisdom” on team-building:

“Even in training programs to help teams develop effectively, the most popular models today shape participants to expect and welcome storming as a necessary phase of a good team’s development. The very idea that in order to get better at teamwork, we must engage in some special form of fighting or arguing with one another is a reason people partly dread being assigned to new teams or projects. The language itself shapes powerful, often self-fulfilling prophecies.”

It seems so obvious now they’ve pointed it out!

The heart of the book is a set of 48 multi-part ‘positive questions’, around such subject areas as “Aligning Purpose and Goals” and “Promoting Leadership”. You could use any question to interview team members individually, have the team explore a question as a group, or have team members pair up and interview each other.

Having so many questions to choose from could save you a lot of time, as you can just select (and adapt, if necessary) the questions relevant to the aspects of your team’s performance that you want to develop.

By the time you have read or tried out a few of the questions, you would find it easy to create more of your own. For example, questions 7-10 are around balancing the various preference pairs in the Myers-Briggs model. You could easily develop similar questions around whatever model (e.g. Belbin team roles) your team is familiar with.

The other sections of the book cover ten ways you could use the questions, for applications ranging from “Selecting Team Members” to “Energizing Team Meetings”, plus a step-by-step guide for conducting a self-managed appreciative inquiry, and a template for building your own appreciative interview guide.

What I’d like to see in the next edition: 1) perhaps a little more practical advice on how to get the process going if you’re starting with a very cynical or demoralised team, and 2) an index.

Overall, this is a very handy book for team leaders who want to create a more positive and therefore more productive climate in their teams.

Order Appreciative Team Building from Amazon UK now.

Review by Andy Smith