Using Appreciative Inquiry in a Liaison Context

A couple of weeks ago, I ran a half-day "IT Strategy Summit", involving around 35 people from the College of Science & Engineering and from Information Services. On the College side there were a number of senior academic staff who are on the College's IT Committee, and a number of IT managers from the Schools within the College. The IS side included relevant Division Directors and Section Heads.

The objectives of this meeting included developing mutual understanding of College requirements and priorities for IT services, and providing an opportunity for informal contact between key IT-related senior staff in College and IS. Quite a lot of thought and preparation went into this meeting, and I decided to use Appreciative Inquiry to structure the discussions.

Appreciative Inquiry (which I've used on several occasions now) was developed at Case Western Reserve University in the 1980s, and has been demonstrated to be a very powerful technique for organisational renewal and development. It is founded on the premise that "organizations move towards what they study". Thus when groups study problems and conflict, they often find that the number and severity of complex and problematic issues grows. When groups study what is good about the way things are, these aspects tend to flourish and grow. AI therefore focuses on the best of an organisation – its positive core.

There are four stages in AI practice: Discover, Dream, Design and Deliver (or "Destiny"). In the summit meeting I used the first three only:

1. Discover what works well. This phase focuses on discovering and appreciating "the best of what is". We do this using unconditionally positive questions. What works well within an organisation? What examples are there of exceptional accomplishment? What made them so successful?
2. Dream an ideal future. This phase calls on us to imagine an inspiring future which embodies our wishes, hopes and dreams. What is our potential as an organisation? What and where do we strive to be?
3. Design a way forward. This phase identifies the actions and processes which lead from where we are now (building on "the best of what is") towards our ideal future. We continue to imagine ourselves in that future, but turn and look back to see how we got there.

In AI, problems and conflict are not ignored, but are set aside until the Dream phase, when they are treated as a desire for "something different", to be worked into the positive vision of an ideal future.

After presentations from the Head of College and Head of IS, the summit was structured as a number of parallel group discussions. Each group was provided with a list of "appreciative questions", covering the three phases, and was invited to record their answers on the flipcharts. There was a "reporting back" session, where groups reported their thinking to the entire meeting.

Overall, I was pretty happy with how things went. The atmosphere was refreshingly positive (which was of course the intention), and there was significant development of mutual understanding.

Some people were complimentary, even enthusiastic, about the AI approach. One or two were frustrated: "the format did not give us an opportunity to discuss the barriers to greater cooperation". I was not altogether surprised. In academic research work (particularly in the Sciences), the focus is very often on identifying and solving difficult problems. AI requires us to take a completely different approach, where problems and barriers are re-framed in terms which encourage rather than inhibit progress. It is a different way of thinking and feeling about the world, which you may find challenging if you are used to problem-oriented thinking!

I strongly recommend AI as a technique in liaison contexts. If you try it out, let me know in the comments how you get on!