What causes a Whole to be at its best?
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3 Questions to Change Your Meeting Conversations
Appreciative Inquiry (AI),
is a philosophy we use to help shift the conversations we are having in a forward looking direction. AI is used to change conversations with yourself, other individuals, your family, teams or an entire organization as we collectively identify the best of what was, what is, and what could be within any human system.
AI combines design thinking, Peter Drucker's Strengths-based Leadership philosophy and the science of Positive Psychology to bring out the best in people in organizations.
Questions are fateful. When we learn to ask new questions, they are fateful. They are a lens that changes how we see everything. They leave an emotional wake behind them, positive or negative.
AI is grounded in the power of questions.
How can leaders benefit from using Appreciative Inquiry?
- Better, more productive meetings
- Faster new initiative development
- Generating rapid ideas for revenue generation/cost savings
- Developing better sales (or other) processes
- Better Employee engagement
- More joy at work
- Significantly improved communications
- Generating ideas nobody could come up with alone
- Getting much higher levels of “buy-in” from the team
- Skill sharing- upgrading each member of the team by sharing strengths Integrating cultures during mergers/acquisitions
- Speeding up change initiatives
- The ability to attract top-tier candidates
- A big reduction of bad actors and “culture destroyers”
- Quicker identification of potential risks, threats
- Shifting themselves from command and control (which they know doesn’t work) to high development and coaching/mentoring in work
- High employee satisfaction
- Greatly increased productivity (ideas are now production)
- Increased agility
- Increased collaboration
- Alignment of values between the organization and employees
- 50% of employees are searching for new jobs or waiting for openings- scary with the cost of training and turnover
What if you could grab all the knowledge of your team, company or community and move them towards their fullest potential?
We use the six Foundational Appreciative Questions to get to the best of what was, what is, and what could be in your organization and we customize the questions and conversation prompts to your needs.
Purpose Questions
High Point Moment Questions
Continuity Questions
Future Image Questions
How Might We Questions
Commitment and Action Questions
Appreciative Inquiry in Business
Appreciative Inquiry turns the problem-solving habits of the field on their head, and shows that change is more powerful, energizing, and effective when we inquire into the true, the good, the better and the possible—everything that gives life to a system when it is most alive and at its exceptional best.
The experience of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) impacts employee engagement by enhancing an employee’s job involvement, efficacy and energy. AI impacts employee feelings and behavior resulting in teamwork, communication, management support and diversity.
AI is not about denying the negative. But it's about appreciating those who are working on things. It's about appreciating what we have to work with, appreciating what is possible.
Appreciative Inquiry Resources
TEDx Talk by Jon Berghoff, President of Flourishing Leadership Institute.
Appreciative Inquiry articles
The Concentration Effect of Strengths
by David Cooperrider
The Essentials of Appreciative Inquiry
by Mohr and Magruder Watkins
Theories, research and supporting evidence for Appreciative Inquiry:
The Living Company
by Arie de Geus
The Future of Management: Where is Gary Hamel Leading Us?
by Robert Grant
Theory U: Leading From The Future As It Emerges
(Summary Overview)
About L.E.A.F Certification
The question we consistently ask ourselves in the LEAF Certification: How do leaders, entrepreneurs and change agents (consultants/trainers/coaches) enable a team, community, or organization to come alive – to be at its very best – more naturally, effectively, and faster than ever before?
Learn more here.