Name: Watch: It Starts with Topic Choice
Uploaded: 2016-04-18T04:42:23.196Z
Duration: 16 min 56 s

[MUSIC]

So in this session we want to come back to stories and

examples of the appreciative inquiry method in action.

So I want to come back to our diagram that we've seen before.

This is the depiction of the change process.

The different stages that you would take another coworker,

a coworker group, a team, a department, that you would take that group through.

We know generally what we mean by the discovery phase.

That's where you interview each other, like you have already done,

with these best past story questions and future questions.

So that you begin to collect, what are the common strengths,

what are the common success factors that are apparent

in this group of stakeholders, whoever you're working with?

Then with that positive core, or

set of strengths in mind, you go to your dream question, and

you go deeper into imagining a positive anticipatory image of the future.

And once you have found the few images that are most attractive,

then you allow people to choose, which one do they most want to work on?

And then they begin the design phase.

New action teams form.

They design an aspiration statement for their change objective.

They begin to design an action plan.

How they're going to get there.

So forth and so on.

And that leads to the implementation, or the destiny phase.

Now, all this, as you can see on the diagram

is predicated on what we call the affirmative topic choice.

So it all begins with, what are we going to do the appreciative inquiry on?

What is it that we're going to study?

Because we know from those underlined principles that

if we study it we will begin to move in that direction.

This is a really key skillset for the appreciative leader,

the ability to reframe problems, issues, opportunities and

so forth, into these affirmative topic choices that

signal right from the beginning where we hope to go,

where we hope to be as we inquire into that particular issue.

So, we say everything begins with this topic choice.

Why? Because human systems move in

the direction of what we deeply and persistently ask questions about.

And because questions themselves are the engine of change,

they are the representation of inquiry.

And inquiry drives change.

Remember one of our principles, you can ask any question in any situation.

I can go in any organization that you taking this course would work in,

and if I want to write a case study on sabotage, I can do it.

If I look hard for anything, I can find it.

So I just gave you a negative example.

I can go into any one of your organizations and

look for extraordinary examples of self-directed teamwork.

And even if you don't use that term, even if you don't really

identify as being part of teams, I can find those examples if I look hard enough.

We can ask any question in any setting.

Therefore, why wouldn't we want to ask the positive question?

Why wouldn't we want to ask the questions that are going to

head us in the direction we most want to go?

So what we need to remember always is,

whatever we're studying, we are going to grow in that direction.

So, do you want to do another survey of low morale?

Or do you want to do a survey to magnify and

learn from moments of highest engagement and commitment?

Now, I put the checkmark on the lower one because I think most of us,

if we had the two choices, would choose, well, the best for

my team, or the best for my organization is to go in the direction of

moments of highest engagement and commitment.

You could select, do another survey of low moral if you really

believed that reducing low moral was the key to your success.

This is not a right and wrong choice.

It's a choice of, where do we want to be in the future?

And it's also pointing out, these are not the same question.

If you do study low morale you are going to find ways to reduce it.

But that does not mean that you're going to get the high engagement or

high enthusiasm.

Same thing, if I study high enthusiasm and

high engagement, I'm going to find ways to get more of that.

I still may have low moral in certain pockets of the organization.

This idea of topic choice is choosing the topic that

most represents where we hope to be in the long-term.

So here's a case story.

You remember the video that you saw in an earlier session about the US Navy?

Where this admiral, the head of the Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations,

Admiral Vern Clark, was coming in to a session where they had gone through

the discovery dream design and so forth.

And he was listening to the presentations.

And then you saw the clip where he was reinforcing they're connection to their

core strengths that had been written on a ship, on the wall, a drawing.

And that they're core strengths had come from the initial paired interviews and

the stories they had shared.

Now, I told you at the time that that appreciative inquiry session, or

summit that we often call it, was focused on retention.

That was the beginning issue that we were invited to help them work with.

They told us that they were having trouble with retention.

Meaning, that the volunteers who spend their first 18 months,

at that 18 month mark they can leave or they can choose to re-up and stay.

The statistics were showing that too many people were leaving.

There weren't enough people staying,

such that they wouldn't have to spend more and more money on training.

And then lose people just at the point where they're getting comfortable with

their jobs.

They're beginning to really specialize and be able to succeed and

reach high productivity in their different job assignments.

So basically too much churn at the bottom of the organization.

So the problem given was retention.

So we sat with this CNO, Admiral Clark, in his office in the Pentagon,

and after he had explained this opening to us we said,

do you mind if we talk to you for a few minutes?

Can we interview you for a few minutes about your relationship with retention?

What it means to you, etc, etc?

And he said sure, go right ahead, my time is yours.

We have scheduled an hour and a half, or something like that.

So that's what we did.

We interviewed him spontaneously in the moment about retention.

Now I'm going to ask you to stop this tape for a moment and reflect and

even jot down, what would be a few of the questions that you would ask him?

Okay?

You're putting on your appreciative inquiry hat.

How would you word a few questions that you would

put to him at this point in the conversation?

So stop the tape now, make a few notes, and then turn it back on.

Okay, welcome back.

Let's talk about the kind of question and

then I'll share with you the questions we asked and how this initial

framing of retention got reframed into what we call the affirmative topic.

Now, I'm sure some of you must have said, well,

let's find out why he thinks people leave.

Why do people leave?

Okay, some of you may have said, well, retention,

you can look at that as the half empty, why they leave?

Or you can also look at it as, why they stay?

So, you may have come up with the question, why do you think people stay?

Both of those questions would lead you to the response which is,

we have done studies.

We've done exit interviews.

We've done interviews of people who've stayed.

I can make sure that my assistant gives you those studies on your way out today so

that you can get familiar with them.

Then he may have had a list in his head of various reasons on either side.

The key thing about both those questions, whether it's about staying or leaving,

is that it begins with a why.

That's going to get you a list.

That's going to get you something in the other person's mind that's already made,

it's already there, lists, okay?

Remember the power of stories.

Remember the power of stories as a connecting vehicle,

a bridging vehicle between people.

What we asked him was, go back to a time in your career

where you obviously weighed the decision to stay or leave.

You stayed because you've been here for over 30 years, but

tell us a story about what you remember going through to make that decision.

So we're asking a story based question, and

we're asking a personal one that's in his life.

So, he's never left.

Obviously, we can't ask him why he left.

But we can ask him a story about wrestling through that decision.

How did he make it?

What were some of the things we can

get from the story that indicate why he stayed?

So he did.

He went back to the time when his oldest daughter was in high school.

I don't remember what rank he was at that point in time, but he said that he and

his wife spend a long time wrestling with the idea, should they leave?

Because we all kind of want to protect

teenagers when they're in that high school period.

If they're moving a lot or there's a lot of transition when they're

trying to deal with all those social development issues, it's difficult.

So, that was his concern.

As a successful naval officer you're moving every 18 to 24 months

with new assignments in different parts of the country.

And so he walked through that story.

And the story obviously ended with him deciding to stay.

And then we said, well, could you go to another point?

Do you remember another time in your career where this issue of staying and

going became really, really critical, and tell us a story about that?

So he went further along to a point where he was being

head hunted by defense contractors.

They wanted to hire him into their organization to become a lobbyist

in Washington to work with the Department of Defense to help

them get contracts and so forth.

And they were offering the red carpet, the best school system, the best housing area,

a very, very lucrative salary, lots of security, etc.

And again, he talked about, they sat with the family, they really considered it,

he worked through various things that he remembered at that point he told us about.

We were about to ask him for one more story when he interrupted and he said,

this is really interesting isn't it?

And we said, what, what's so interesting?

And he said, well, both those stories, it's the same reason.

He says, I love succeeding as a leader.

The Navy gives me training, they give me responsibility and

then they give me the opportunity to take a little more responsibility with

feedback, a little bit of a safety net.

And he said, if I take that extra responsibility and succeed,

I get the feedback to help me monitor how I'm doing.

He said, if I succeed, I just love it.

He says, as selfish as they may sound,

that's really what was going on in both of those incidences.

So right then and there, the topic of retention began to shift.

It began to become something a little bit bigger.

Maybe this isn't about simply figuring out why people leave and

preventing some of that, or why people stay and

increasing some of it, maybe it's a little bit larger.

Could it be about this notion that everybody's a leader?

That there's leadership in every job at all levels.

He turned this whole question of the topic over to a task force of about 25

Naval officers of varying ranks, and he gave them two questions.

He says, I want you to decide whether or

not we should use appreciate inquiry on this issue.

And secondly, what should the wording of the goal of the summit be?

If you decide yes,

we want to have an appreciative inquiry summit, then what should be the topic?

And he shared with them his stories that he had shared with us, and

the awareness that he had of this idea of

succeeding as a leader seems to be really, really important.

The group wrestled with both questions.

They decided, yes, we want to use the appreciative inquiry process.

And the topic that they ultimately came up with was engaged and

empowered leaders at every level.

They also shard stories with each other, just like the Admiral Clark

had done with us, about when they had remembered going

through the tough decision to stay or to go, they did the same thing.

They shared those stories, they looked for the underlying success factors.

So the reframed topic, engaged and empowered leaders at every level.

The, at every level, is what addresses the retention issue.

How can you take a young volunteer who's been through three months basic training,

they're now 15 months on an assigned job,

how can you make part of that job a leadership experience?

And then how can you provide the training, the feedback,

the support so that they have a fair chance to succeed?

And if they succeed, then the idea is,

they're more likely to stay as opposed to go.

If you remember, the outcome of this particular case was that

this admiral reported to the Congress congressional hearings

that they had saved over $2 billion in unnecessary expenditures on training.

In other words, retention had gone up such that they had reduced training and

saved $2 billion I think three years after this AI project had begun.

[MUSIC]

Watch: It Starts with Topic Choice

Leading Positive Change through Appreciative Inquiry

Meet the Instructors