Highlighting our best gets us to be even better
A few days ago, it was my first time doing a guided appreciative inquiry exercise. It was an interesting experience because I found that it was easier for me to ask other people questions than it was to share about my own passions.
Talking about my passions and strengths was undoubtedly a little hard for me because I generally don’t really like to share much about myself – I don’t find myself that interesting and I was scared that I’d bore the people in our tiny group. So, I found that although I was happy to talk about my strengths, I was also watching the clock closely, making sure that I wasn’t oversharing to the point of being annoying.
Asking questions was much easier for me. I’m a naturally sociable and inquisitive person, so even in everyday life, I usually ask questions about my friends’ lives a lot. To illustrate, during the exercise, I discovered that one of my groupmates is passionate about dancing but recently quit. I asked him why he quit because I was genuinely curious to find out why; it doesn’t really make sense to quit something you like doing. He then thoroughly explained why he quit, which satisfied my curiosity, and also seemed to be liberating for him. It felt natural to me to ask him that question; even if I hadn’t been previously prompted to ask questions, I would’ve asked him it anyway. I guess you could say probing is kind of like breathing to me.
Through this exercise, I recognize that appreciative inquiry helps bring about change because it efficiently directs attention to what is working in businesses – these uncovered best practices can then be integrated by other businesses into their operations. To elaborate further, appreciative inquiry is simply framing questions in a positive way, which will end up getting answers that highlight strengths and effective ways of working. From these answers, other people can get ideas on how to bring that best practice into their businesses. Also, the business that’s being asked about a certain best practice can explicitly explore what they’re doing right, which presents an opportunity to segue into identifying how they can improve even further or how they can further leverage their best practice to yield better results and greater impact.