Ankit Patel, principal partner with The Lean Way Consulting firm while doing some work with the Cleveland Clinic, discovered Appreciative Inquiry and saw an opportunity to blend it with his work in Continuous Improvement. I had a podcast with Ankit and you can access the podcast and entire transcription: Blending Appreciative Inquiry with Lean.
In the podcast I asked Ankit: Can you give me examples of some of the questions that I might use to lead into an encounter, or lead into a process and take more of a positive approach when we start out?
Ankit: Sure, absolutely. I’ll give a couple examples. I use a lot of AI with strategy. One of the approaches with strategy, I did an AI initiative with an organization here called the Organization Change Alliance, and what I asked them was…well, first off, what they were looking to do was grow their organization. They’re a non?profit association for org development. What we did was we said OK, let’s take a…here’s a three set of questions that we want you to answer to do some initial data collection, just with the board. And so what we said was, the first question, what is it that attracted you to the OCA, which is called the Organization Change Alliance, what attracted you to the organization? They would all talk about it, and they’d pair off in their views.
The second question is OK, what do you think is happening that’s just fantastic, and we’re just knocking out of the park, and you want to see that continue into the future?
The third question there would be OK, let’s imagine you fell asleep, and you wake up 10 years later and the OCA has grown beyond your wildest dreams, everything you ever imagined is in place. What does it look like, and what are some of the steps that the organization took to get there?
What you’re doing there is building successes off the past, and isolating core factors that are really working well, and then building a vision of the future. When you get folks thinking in terms of that, they start getting more hopeful, they get more engaged; they get more passionate to drive forward.
Another example would be, let’s say you’re working more on a profit level. I’m working with a client at an IT service company, and one of the things they’re looking at is speed of closure. They’re an IT recruiting firm. They want to reduce the time it takes from the time they get a rec, a requirement, or a job, and the time it actually gets filled.
One of the questions that we would ask to the recruiters is, Tell me about a time when you had just expedient customer service and closure of a job that you had on the table.” We asked them that question and started getting ideas. Let’s talk about that experience.
Then the next part of that question might be something like ?? well, there’s a couple parts, but one of the parts was, “If you had to bottle the top five characteristics of what made that experience so great, what would you put in that bottle?” Again same concept there, trying to isolate the factors.
The third part is looking into the future of designing, what it would look like if everything was like that top experience that you experienced, that you went through.
The basic format is: what worked well in the past, what are the key factors in how you design a future around those factors. That’s just an initial starting point, though. So, it’s a very integrative process. Each situation is different. With the OCA, the Association, we’ll actually be going back and drilling down into some more specific topics. We’re going to ask those topics in a bigger session with both members and also non?members that we would like to become members to get their feedback on how to improve.
With the IT recruiting firm, the service-based industry, what we’re going to do is actually take those pieces that we found, and once they’re finished we’re going to integrate them into some process change recommendations, and we’re going to start bringing the team back to the table and say, “These are some things we thought of. Now how do we go and do this moving forward?” Things like; we need to standardize, and we need to change our prioritization matrix. Those type of things.
Transcription and Podcast: Blending Appreciative Inquiry with Lean
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