Find Out How the Design Stage of Appreciative Inquiry Works in This Episode
In the Design stage of Appreciative Inquiry’s 5-D change format, we’re building a bridge from the best of what exists already (brought to light in the Discovery stage) to the vision of an ideal future that we co-constructed in the Dream stage.
This episode is all about what happens in the Design stage if you’re facilitating it with a team or a small group. Including:
- The added advantage compared to the ‘Options’ stage in the GROW model
- The most important thing to say when you brief participants
- Why we welcome ‘bad’ ideas at this stage
- Suggestions for how to frame the idea-generating process
- How to make sure the introverts in the group aren’t crowded out
- Step by step instructions for running the Design stage with a team or small group
- How to scale up the Design stage if you’re working with a larger group
- Practical, nuts-and-bolts considerations for facilitating the Design stage with a team
… and more!
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Transcript
What Happens in the Design Stage?
The Design stage of Appreciative Inquiry is sometimes described as “building a bridge from the ‘best of what is’ (revealed, at least in part, in the Discovery stage) to the best of ‘what could be’ (the vision set out in the Dream stage)”.
According to David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney, the essential question in this stage is:
“What would our organization look like if it were designed in every way possible to maximize the qualities of the positive core and enable the accelerated realization of our dreams?” – from their article ‘Exploring Appreciative Inquiry’ in Perspectives On Business And Global Change Vol. 14. No. 2, 2001.
What this involves in practice depends on the scope of the Inquiry process. If you’re using Appreciative Inquiry as a coaching methodology, it’s mostly about that team or individual coming up with ideas to bring the Dream into reality or to get closer to it.
Astute readers with an interest in coaching are probably thinking at this point, “Aha – so it’s analogous to the ‘Options’ stage in the GROW model.”
Yes it is – and it has the added advantage that participants will previously have had their Empathic brain networks lit up by the preceding Dream and Discovery stages, so they’ll be feeling more creative, trusting, and open to new ideas.
This is a much better state for developing new ideas, especially in collaboration with fellow team members, than if their Analytical networks have been activated – always a potential pitfall when exploring the ‘Reality’ stage of the GROW process (unless the coach is really careful).
One important thing to brief participants in the idea generation process about is that they don’t have to commit to any of the ideas they come up with (selecting the options that they’re actually going to commit to and carry out comes later, in the Delivery stage).
If they did feel they had to commit to or defend the ideas they offer, that would inhibit their creativity. They’d be reluctant to say out loud whatever their playful creative unconscious comes up with in case there are flaws that they hadn’t noticed, in case they were judged for coming up with a ‘bad idea’.
But in fact, in the first stage at least of idea generation there are no bad ideas. Creativity works by association, not by logical analysis, so we aren’t judging the ideas or subjecting them to quality control at this stage. We just want lots of ideas, so that we have a range to choose from later.
In fact, we welcome ‘bad’ ideas! Why? Because one idea (that objectively is ‘bad’ or obviously won’t work) might spark an idea in someone else, that calls to mind a similar-sounding word in the mind of a third participant that leads to a great idea that saves the organisation. There are no bad ideas at this stage.
With larger-scale organisational change, the Design stage goes a bit deeper and is necessarily somewhat more analytical. It involves taking a fresh look at the structures, processes, and culture of the organisation, possibly redesigning structures and business processes to help it become whatever it needs to be in order to make the Dream possible – although you could still run idea-generation sessions as part of that process.
How to Run the Design Stage with a Team or Small Group
The best time to facilitate the Design stage of an Appreciative Inquiry is straight after the Dream stage, when the team is still buzzing from creating their vision of the desired future together. Keep people on the same tables as when they constructed their Dream.
Here’s how you could frame the idea-generating process:
“Thinking about the Dream, which aspects do you feel most moved to work on bringing into reality? Or maybe you have ideas for bringing the Dream as a whole into reality?
What ideas do you have at the level of structures, workflows, or information sharing?
What ideas do you have for small, marginal gains and ideas for improvement, or maybe doing the things you are already doing but doing them differently?
Remember, you’re not committing to any of these ideas at the moment, and we’re not evaluating them – you can do that to select the ones you take forward later.
An idea that seems crazy, or one that seems very small, may lead to another idea that makes a massive difference. So all ideas are good ideas at this point – we want the crazy ideas and the small ideas too!”
Here are the instructions I would normally give at this point:
Take 3 minutes by yourself, silently, to note down any ideas you have already.
Then go round the table, and one by one share your ideas with the group, making sure everyone’s ideas are heard.
Alternatively, you could say: Get into pairs with someone you don’t normally work with and talk them through your ideas, before sharing them with the table as a whole.
Starting off the process in either of these two ways ensures that the introverts in the group get their ideas heard. If there are higher-status members in the group – for example, the team leader or a member of senior management, make sure they don’t give their ideas first, so as to minimise the possibility of ‘groupthink’.
Then you can throw in any additional ideas you’ve thought of during that process, and as a group start building on whichever ideas have inspired you the most.
After 20 minutes (you can shorten or lengthen this time, depending on how much time is available), we’ll ask each table to present their ideas to the rest of the room (if it’s just a small team of up to 8 people, you as the facilitator can be their audience).
The aim is to have a whole array of ideas, some viable, some just stepping stones in the process of association that creates other ideas. No-one is being asked to commit to any of the ideas at this stage. We just want a rich field of ideas and options to select from in the next stage, Delivery (or ‘Destiny’).
The table of 4-8 people is the basic unit, making this a very scalable process. If you have more people, just add more tables.
If you’re working with the whole organisation in one room, you could add another stage where people re-form into their functional teams and generate ideas for what they can do to make their part in the Dream into reality.
Alternatively, people may be inspired to volunteer for ad-hoc project teams around making a particular aspect of the Dream happen.
Practical Considerations for Facilitating the Design Stage with a Team or Small Group
You’ll need some way of recording the ideas generated – you could use Post-It notes, which make it easy to group related ideas at the end of the Design stage, or pre-designed ‘idea sheets’.
Speaking of Post-It notes, remember to use the branded ones, not the cheaper copies that you find in supermarkets – because the glue on those is weaker and after an hour or so of being stuck up on a wall or flip chart, they’ll start to fall off one by one.
You’ll also need someone to be responsible for collecting and collating the ideas and probably writing them up. If you’re an external facilitator, this should not be you, because you probably won’t be familiar with any terminology or references in the ideas that are specific to the organisation or the sector that it operates in.
As we get to this stage in the 5-D cycle, we’re starting to come down from the high-level metaphoric representations of the Dream stage, and moving towards the detail of how the implementation will be done in the Delivery stage.
If you’re taking a team or a small organisation through Discovery, Dream, Design, and maybe Delivery in a single day, the Design stage is pretty much a brainstorming session. So if you have a favourite brainstorming method – Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’, for example, or Robert Dilts’ ‘Disney Strategy For Creativity’ – you can slot it right in (if you don’t have a preferred method, there’s a step-by-step guide to the Disney Strategy coming right up).
Encouraging people to think up new ideas during an Appreciative Inquiry process does have one advantage over running a standalone brainstorming session, and it’s this: whatever method you use, even if it’s just asking people to think up ideas, you’ll probably find that the team or group have already had their Empathic Networks activated by the Discovery and Dream stages, so they’re already in the right psychological and emotional state to generate ideas and be open to new ideas from others. Each stage in the Appreciative Inquiry process psychologically primes participants to perform better in the next stage.
