Appreciative Inquiry Reection Paper

Marco Cassone MSOD 618 Dr Julie Chesley

OPENING REFLECTION
Prior to Costa Rica, my learning group, entertained a lively discussion on if and how AI differs
from other interventions. Is it yet another tool we may add to our trusty OD toolkit alongside so
many others? And if so, does one presume a particular kind of client, context, circumstance, or
OD diagnosis that clearly points to AI above other interventions? The telltale sign of any good
dialogue is coming away with more questions than answers, which was certainly the case here.

THE TWO LEVELS OF AI
Appreciative Inquiry lives on two levels that can seem conated to me. In the context of our
study, AI has occurred as the next stop on the MSOD buffet line of interventions to sample and
ingest, but limiting AI like this doesnt feel quite right. AI is indeed a tool with a specic and
developed protocol as an intervention; more importantly, however, it is also a perspective that
lives above any particular application. What Ive learned from the MSOD program is the inherent
complexity of OD itselfthat is, the numerous co-existing ways of slicing and dicing reality
depending on the questions asked and intended focus of attention. In this way, the world can be
divided into problem-centered and strengths-based approaches, and as we gleaned from
Appreciative Living, these can be applied at any level of system, from individuals to
organizations. Independent of how a particular AI intervention might be applied, one can nd
great reward in bringing an appreciative outlook to most situations and relationships in life.

THE ADDICTIVE NATURE OF PROBLEMS
So I asked myself why wouldnt everyone espouse a strengths-based approach all the time? A
fair enough question. The answer is the same answer as to why soap operas, reality TV, and
pop lyrics exist: ego fodder. Self-assigned as our silent, protective sentinel, the human ego is
always scanning the horizon for the next potential threat, and problems are too deliciously
addictive not to pay attention to. After all, they not only validate our OD toolkits, they validate us,
the problem solvers! There is an addictive, cyclical nature to constant re ghting, which can
make it difcult for both OD consultants and those we serve to discern when a strengths-based
approach will truly serve and when it might simply occur irrelevant and detached from reality.
TURNING TO AI IN COSTA RICA
My consulting team in Costa Rica consisted of my co-leader, Patrice Pederson, and fellow
cohort members, Melissa Cruz and David Loebsack. We were paired with the CRUSA
Foundation, a private, independent, non-political, and non-prot Costa Rican foundation. This
was not an easy assignment, to be sure, although I believe a strong outcome was achieved and
experienced by the limited participants involved.

THE COMPLEXITY OF CRUSA
Our primary contact at CRUSA was the Program Director, MCa change agent herself, and
given the limitations of her subordinate role, a secret change agent at that. She is a driven,
passionate leader in her own right, and her title perhaps belies her vision and capacity to
develop her organization. From the start, MC openly criticized the CRUSA Board of Directors as
calcied in their conservative and fear-based approach to the nearly $90M they control.

My personal/professional impression is that MC may not have understood the aim of the AI
workshop offered through our Pepperdine practicum. Pressure of an impending board meeting
introduced an immediate and unshakeable presenting problem; as such, MC had a xed idea of
what useful and viable solutions for her could look like. This tunnel vision confounded our
student team from achieving the goal of co-facilitating an AI intervention for CRUSA. All of our
discussion with MC centered around how to get the BoD to change, yet she had never intended
to get them in the room to work with. Based on her behavior and choices, its arguable whether
MC entertained AI as a possibility; she had neither the capacity nor the authority to allocate
precious board meeting time to something as elusive as appreciative inquiry. In this way, what
transpired was likely far from the intended practicum design of co-presenting AI to as many
available from the host system as possible, a goal depicted in the expanded, yellow-now-green
inner circle on the far right below:







Day 2
Intended host
org dept (w/ initial
presenting problem)
as target to experience
co-facilitated day 2
AI intervention
+ =
Day 1
org sub-group
learning about
AI w/ MSOD
students
Goal: host
org dept (w/ initial
presenting problem)
experiences benet of
AI as learned tool &
new paradigm for
problem solving
in future
AN APPRECIATIVE REVIEW OF WHAT TRANSPIRED
A little context. Her strong background working with nonprots gave Patrice both an advantage
and disadvantage in listening to MC share her presenting problem with our team on day 1. The
circumstance seemed the perfect opportunity to take advantage of Patrices wealth of
professional knowledge; the more MC dove into her trials and tribulations with the board, the
more Patrice showed sincere empathy and a desire to jump into potential solutions. This was a
valuable lesson for me to observe how easy it is to unconsciously let strengths and professional
past collude with a client, especially in initial stages when building rapport.

At some point in our never-ending intake, I interrupted to refocus the group on the task at hand,
which was designing our co-facilitated AI presentation the following day. The slightly dismissive
response from MC began to paint the picture that her intention all along had been to harvest
grad school business student ideas towards her immediate problem; exploring the benets of AI
to improve her relationship to the board may not have been a real consideration.

WHAT SENSE DO I MAKE HERE
The quick label I give this circumstance is lack of clarity in initial contracting, but this may be an
oversimplication. Western business culture steeps us in problem solving; it is fundamentally
ingrained in our worldview, and becoming aware of it is like asking a goldsh to be aware of the
water it swims in. So I certainly cant fault MC for either her addictive problem-centered focus
nor her resistance to any discussion outside of immediate solution. My takeaway here is this will
likely be a common experience I must learn to navigate in future OD engagements, that
problem-solving will often trump client openness to exploring different paradigms or new ways of
looking at the problems they have to solve. This means I must develop the skill of truly hearing
client pain points while simultaneously building client openness to new alternatives.

WHAT DID WE DO
Im proud to say that our team ultimately succeeded in trusting the processanother valuable
lesson for me. Despite the hours of late night deliberation on how and whether to use our clever
brain power to help MC solve her issues, our nal course of action for Day 2 was quite simple:
Take back control of the dialogue in order to focus on our list of appreciative questions,
Feed back to MC the themes, connections, and inconsistencies we heard in her sharing,
Finish with questions allowing MC to have her own insights and draw her own conclusions.
THE RESULT
In the end, MC came away with a transformational shift in her point of view. From her
progressive perspective, CRUSAs board of directors only cared about protecting its image and
assets; growth in the organization occurred at a glacial pace at best. From this context, the only
possibility she saw for enacting change and receiving project funding was to cater to the boards
fear and ignorance, covertly couching her own organizational change initiatives within bullet-
proof proposals the board couldnt say no to. She had been insulating the board from anything
but rosy reports, inadvertently robbing the board of any pain or reward point that might be
impetus for reection and growth. The ah-ha we helped her see is that she could grow the
boards intrinsic desire to evolve by growing an organizational interest in evaluating the
successesand failuresof CRUSA funded projects. Her covert tactics in capacity building
would be much easier if the board members themselves could be enrolled in improving their
effectiveness and valuing their excellence.

TOUCHING BACK ON MY PRACTICE POINT OF VIEW
In my learning journal summary, I shared about my new fascination with structure and the
emergent, especially as elements that affect our learning group dynamics. Id like to step away
from CRUSA momentarily to explore how these elements might also relate to large scale
interventions. Im coming to appreciate structure as a necessary container for the emergent.
Heres my analogy: ooding water always ows along the easiest path available. Without a
pathway to follow, water ow is unpredictable, but over a river bed or canyon, it is guided by the
available structure. Consider what can replace water to build on this metaphor: energy,
attention, thinking, inspiration, dialogue, learning, action, and so much of what we study in the
behavioral sciences. Nothing guides an ensuing dialogue better, for example, than the structure
of good initial questions. (Note to self: Remember to apply this to my thesis!) This is
profoundly important when it comes to designing experiential learning and OD interventions
large and small: it is structure that allows energy to be gathered, directed, bottled, and diffused.

HOW THIS AFFECTS MY PERSPECTIVE ON CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Considering our recent AI practicum, Im now starting to see the transformational potential of
getting the whole system in the room to create a shared vision of the future. After all, humans
are social creatures, and learning itself is a highly social process. In this way, perhaps it can be
said that one of the strongest forms of enrollment, change readiness, and conviction on a
personal level comes from shared the ah-has experienced on a collective level. It is inside of
relationships and dialogue that we make sense of the world, which is always a uid interplay
between past, present, and future that is continually redened through human interaction. In this
way, the term change management occurs like a top-down command-and-control charade that
totally misses the point. Of course 70% of all change management initiatives fail if management
pushes them through as if organizations are machines composed of homogenous, non-thinking
autobots. People are complex, teams and groups are more complex, organizations and trans-
org systems are unbelievably complex. In each case, there are as many diverse and
incongruent mental models about reality as there are people in a given system.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT TO ME
One thing Im passionate about in my Practice Point of View is helping organizations harness
and maximize care. I see care as a number one limited resource worth protecting. Lack of care
is the hidden cancer that eats away at organizational wellbeing. When leaders assume
employees are paid to buy into a depersonalized, homogenous, and centrally spoon-fed way of
dealing with change, they are inadvertently asking people to minimize their own sense making
of transition and preventing them from nding their own reason to care about it. In this way, OD
practitioners must create interventions that provide the structural containers in which stories,
perspectives, visions, conicting motivations, misaligned understandings, etc. may emerge and
coalesce into shared ah-has. Change management should not avoid the complexity of
independent, co-existing mental models as much as nd ways to absorb complexity and grow
from it. By having every voice in the room engaged in dialogue and feeling heard, the shared
ah-has become the foundation that allows individuals to glean their own insights, make their
own sense of change, rediscover their care, and ultimately choose their own personally-
meaningful resolve to move ahead; without which most unsuccessful change initiatives simply
add to the 70% statistic of failure.