Conversations Worth Having: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Fuel Productive and Meaningful Engagement by Jackie Stavros & Cheri Torres

Author:Jackie Stavros & Cheri Torres
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2018-05-22T04:00:00+00:00

The Story in Front of Us Influences Our Expectations

Poetic Principle: Every person, organization, or situation can be seen and understood from many perspectives.

Daniel worked with First Nation’s youth and had an especially challenging job of trying to help gang members choose a different path. He had been taking these troubled groups on ropes course adventures to teach them teamwork and leadership skills,5 though without much success. Daniel did not believe these gang members knew much about teamwork or leadership, as evidenced both by their failure to complete challenges and by the life choices they were making. He had hoped that if he could teach them these skills, they might take a leadership role in their own lives.

Everything we say and do moves us and those around us.

One day a grant came through for him to purchase a portable challenge course, which included training. During his training, he was introduced to a different kind of facilitation: Appreciative Facilitation.6 Instead of pointing out why teams failed at activities, this process invited participants to identify moments of success and build on strengths. During the training, Daniel was introduced to the AI principles, and he had a major “aha!” moment, just like Alisha. He reflected on the assumptions and stories he believed about the gang members and understood how they were influencing the way he saw them, what he listened for, and what he said to them. Without knowing it, he had been reinforcing his beliefs in their incompetence, and he felt dismayed that his debriefing style had actually reinforced their negative behaviors.

When he started facilitating with generative questions, a whole different story began to emerge. One of his first questions was simple: “Even though you didn’t complete the challenge, what was working for you?” As they struggled with this shift in focus, Daniel tried to remember witnessing something that was working so that he could cue them. “Remember when you were able to stay on the beams and began to move the team across the swamp? What did you do to help you to stay on the beam and move as a team?” One young man volunteered, “We were holding on to each other. That helped us balance.” Then more of them voiced ideas: “We moved slowly, and we didn’t pull someone until they were ready.” “Sammy wasn’t on yet, and he could tell us what was happening because he could see everybody. That helped me focus.”

In that moment, Daniel realized these kids actually had teamwork and leadership skills. They used them to be a tight gang. He just hadn’t looked for them. Over time, his questions surfaced skills in each young man, and some of them discovered they were strong leaders. He now saw his job as helping them realize how capable they were and cultivating their strengths to be effective leaders in the community. Over the next year, Daniel’s struggle turned into joy as he watched the potential of these kids emerge. He inspired them to create new challenge activities using

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