A Solution-Focused Path to High Performance
Strategic Thinking
Appreciative Inquiry:
A Solution-focused Path to High Performance Organizations
by Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.
Solutions Consulting Group, Inc.
Salt Lake City, UT
© 2000-2003 Lynn D. Johnson.
Going to work . . .
“So, what do you do?” At a party, on the golf course, at a Chamber of Commerce mixer, the question asks how we organize our productive life. It is, contrary to what many people think, not a bad question. Most adults have a profound investment in their work life, and talking with them about their work is often talking about one of the core parts of them. We are certainly not what we do for a living, but what we do has an influence. We hope to find meaning and fulfillment in our work, and just bringing home a paycheck is not anyone’s idea of a meaningful life.
Yet we also find over and over that one’s work is a source of much stress and pain. I was on an airplane, and turned to the man in the next seat. “Are you going to work,” I asked, “or going home?” He was traveling to meet with one of his company’s largest clients. When he asked what I was doing, I explained I was going to give a talk to a business group on high performance, low stress organizations, and he started to laugh. “You ought to give that talk to our company,” he said.
I love good stories, and I felt lucky. “This,” I thought, “is going to be a good story.” And it was. He told me of the high stress and low performance in his current job, and how he was looking for another place to work, how much he hated going to work, and how discouraged he was about ever finding a place to work that didn’t involve pain, stress, and anxiety. There had been a takeover and the old president left. The new company president believed that fear and intimidation were the pathways to perfection. He would scream at the senior leadership, and they in turn would scream at each other. My traveling companion hated it. He didn’t believe in fear and intimidation. He believed in trust and cooperation. It wasn’t there any more.
To replace a person like that, a senior VP, costs the company at least 1.3 times the person’s annual salary. That is the very least. The company was about to lose a valuable employee because they had become mired in negativity and blame.
What kind of work . . .
People want to be about something of value. They want to make a difference, have freedom to make decisions, to feel they are learning and growing. In today’s era, being employed is not enough. Being employable is the key, and the young people know that. They are interested in what will bring them knowledge, experience and growth.
Pathways to Growth
My background is in clinical psychology, and I spent thousands of hours struggling with patients looking for growth and meaning in their lives. They generally felt they needed to understand their failures and problems in order to grow. Surprisingly enough, I learned something of value came more often from examining successes than from failures. If someone was depressed, we could actually make more progress by carefully analyzing the times when that person felt more energy and enthusiasm than by analyzing the down times.
We also found that dreams were more helpful than fears, at stimulating best performance. Yet ironically, so many people tend to motivate themselves out of fear – it would be awful if this or that happened, so I must avoid it! We came to call this new approach “The Solution Focus.”
Focusing on solutions helped my practice in psychology. I published research showing that in less than five sessions, a majority of patients had achieved a successful level of functioning. I was a leader in showing the actual results of psychotherapy, and went on to publish a book on the work we at my center were doing.
That brought me into consulting with mental health centers, social service agencies, and eventually consulting with all sorts of businesses and organizations. Everywhere I found the same thing: A solution focus energized and optimized efforts, improving productivity, morale, retention, and making the workplace an exciting experience.
Around that time, I discovered some people in the organizational behavior area who were doing the same kind of work. David Cooperrider and his colleagues as Case Western Reserve were using a very similar approach that they called “Appreciative Inquiry.” I adopted some of their tools and combined it with solution-focused techniques.
Appreciative Inquiry
Appreciative Inquiry (“AI”)is a system of energizing and invigorating organizations so that people find what they want, and the organizations produce what they should. It is a profoundly unique approach to designing high performance organizations, because it shifts from the “fix what is broken” model to a “discover what works and design what will work better” approach. AI is a transformational tool that we can use to energize whole organizations, teams, and individuals. It is focused on solutions, not on problems. I have successfully used AI principles to coach individuals to higher performance, to help teams communicate and produce better, and to help whole organizations discover positive energy.
I have had a transformation of my own. I have traveled from a problem oriented to a solution focused approach to life. When I was in graduate school, I learned how to diagnose what was wrong with individuals, marriages, and organizations. We learned to do a ‘gap analysis’ where we defined where the organization should be, where it was, and how to fix those gaps. It seemed like the thing to do.
After all, isn’t fixing what is wrong what we are all about? In reality, we were applying a mechanical approach to organic systems. In your car, when something breaks, we have to find the broken part and replace it. “There’s your trouble, there’s your trouble” sing the Dixie Chicks in their hit record, and it seems to make sense. If we find the trouble, we know the solution.
That is fine for fixing computers and pickup trucks. But that is not how a human being becomes great. In the late 1980's we were discovering that in clinical psychology. When we focused our conversations on what was right with the patient, there was greater change and development than when we diagnosed what was wrong. As you now know, we called that ‘The Solution Focus.” Individuals and couples could go from a problem-saturated state to high spirits and solutions quickly when I focused on strengths. When I discovered Appreciative Inquiry in the 1990's I realized that it was better to discover the strengths of an organization and build on that.
Basic assumptions . . .
So what do we do to make sense of the world in AI? Well, let me contrast AI with the traditional problem-solving model:
Traditional Approach
What is the problem?
What are the underlying reasons for the problem?
How did things get so bad?
Who is to blame?
How will we fix it?
AI Approach
What are the strengths and gifts of the organization?
What are the underlying causes of the strengths and gifts?
What gives the organization spirit and life?
Who contributes to spirit and life?
How can we keep up the good work?
How can we do even more
What we found is that the traditional approach soon degenerated into defensiveness and accusations. When we start talking about gap analysis, the talk turns to who caused the gap and how we can blame them. But when we shifted to an AI view, we started discovering enthusiasm instead of defensiveness.
Solution Oriented Assumptions of AI . . .
1.The principle of overlooked strength: In every organization something works. In every person, something works. When we ignore problems and focus our curiosity on strengths and skills, we can achieve more, because it is always easier and better to grow a strength than to correct a problem.
2.The principle of attention: What we focus on becomes our reality. Psychologists have tests called projectives such as Rorschach tests. The Rorschach is a series ink blots, and the patient looks at it and makes a story. Obviously, someone who sees flowers and friendly animals is a different sort of person than one who sees blood, fire, and destruction. We can change our reality by changing what we focus on.
3.The principle of perspective: There are many ways to understand the same situation. The more perspectives we have on a situation, the greater the depth of understanding. Instead of assuming that we have all truth and those who disagree are simply wrong, we can learn to be curious about what we can learn from people with different perspectives. We come to see differences as a source of competitive advantage. If all the perspectives focus on strength, we deeply understand how to build on strength.
Sometimes we call this the ‘poetic principle,’ meaning that good poetry can be read many different ways. Rather than finding the one true way to see something, we might find ways that are inspirational and energizing. A problem from one perspective can actually be a solution from another point of view.
4.The principle of inquiry: The act of asking questions of an organization or group influences the group in some way. If I ask questions about positive potential, the organization moves in that direction; if I ask questions about weaknesses, we move toward weakness.
5.The principle of self-definition: People create their future by their ideas about the past. What we remember from the past tends to predict the kinds of future we will have.
6.The principle of selection: we cannot attend to everything at once. We have to keep some things and leave others. Since we carry parts of the past forward, they should be what is best about the past.
7.The principle of creation: The legendary business consultant Peter Drucker once said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” How we recall our past and how we talk about our future creates our present moment. We create for ourselves the results of our own ideas. So if we are open minded about the ideas others have about the future, we enrich our own possibilities.
How it works . . .
AI interventions in an organization focus on four steps.
1. Discover the best of the past. We interview each other to discover what has worked. Since in any organization, something works, it is gratifying and encouraging to hear what those things are.
2. Dream of what is possible. We interview each other with an eye to discovering, “What if things were the best they could be? What would be different?”
3. Design the processes and structures that support our best dream.
4. Deliver our Destiny: We commit to ourselves and each other to accomplish the design, and we design systems of accountability and recognition.
The intervention must be at all levels. From the top to the bottom, all must be involved in the process of Discover, Dream, Design and Deliver. The board of directors creates their dream, but the line workers create their own dream.
This is a process of involvement. Everyone helps create the high performance organization. While it takes time, it is done right and doesn’t need re-doing.
How does it work in real life?
I was asked to help a struggling organization. The Board recently replaced the CEO, and the organization was full of fear. The old CEO had been fired, there were ugly rumors floating around, and there was some anger over the new CEO. Some Board members were very critical of the new person, while others thought he should have a chance. There were some inevitable political squabbles and territorial problems, and one popular Senior VP left. Morale was sinking, as was productivity, and turnover, and political infighting was on the rise.
The company asked me for a strategic planning retreat. The executive committee, the 24 top people in the company, were looking for some time to think about ‘what is next?’ They liked the AI focus on positive strengths and inquiring about possibilities.
At the retreat, we focused on a reinterpretation of the past using AI principles. We looked for the strengths of the old organization, the strengths of the new CEO, and the times when the company was closest to excellence. We collected and shared stories of victory, dedication, and empowerment. We discovered people who trusted and liked the new CEO and hear their stories of why.
Then we focused on dreaming. Where can we go from here? What are the reasons why we are confident we can go on? The committee discovered empowering dreams and visions of where they want the company to be next year, five years, and ten years.
We designed vital changes into the organization to support the new vision, and we created systems of accountability and recognition for success. Everyone made commitments to the new plan.
Result: The company is revitalized. Problems are being solved, unity and honesty are present in executive meetings, and all the ‘numbers’ now look better and better. Three years later, the company is more productive and profitable than ever.
This is not unusual. Strength-based development works.
Why not now?
Today is a day you can begin to accomplish a renewal of your organization. Now is the moment that contains all moments; now is full of powerful potential, waiting to be tapped. Move confidently toward a positive future. And as you do, help unexpected and undreamed of will materialize in the moment of most need. All things will come together and the people will say, “We have done it, we have all helped, and we will continue with what works.”
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About the author: Lynn Johnson holds a Ph.D. in counseling psychology and is an organizational consultant. You can contact him at Solutions Consulting Group, 166 East 5900 South, B-108, Salt Lake City, UT 84107. The telephone is (801) 261-1412.
E-mail ljohnson@solution-consulting.com.