In the latest episode of the Positive Change Methods Podcast, we have a fascinating with Jackie Stavros and Cheri Torres, the authors of the acclaimed book Conversations Worth Having. This episode delves into the principles of Appreciative Inquiry, a methodology that promotes positive change through meaningful conversations.
Some of the highlights (which include some insights I hadn’t heard from Appreciative Inquiry thought leaders previously):
- “It’s not about asking the positive or being positive. It’s about having conversations that add value.” – Cheri Torres
- ‘Action research’ explained!
- The importance of curiosity in appreciative conversations
- How it’s vital to listen when people point out when there’s a problem, and not be afraid of asking about it
- The importance of ‘tuning in’ to people
- The difference between ‘above the line’ and ‘below the line’ conversations
- How to avoid ‘toxic positivity’
And lots more!
Listen to the episode with the podcast player below or subscribe via your favourite podcast app.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:28 — 63.8MB)
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If you prefer to watch a video of the conversation, it’s on YouTube here
‘Conversations Worth Having’ Resources
You can find Jackie and Cheri’s Conversations Worth Having resources, books, courses and other stuff at www.cwh.today. That’s also where you can get 20% off their CWH Foundations Course, On-Demand Bootcamps, and any of their QuickStart Guides by using the coupon code ‘POSITIVECHANGE’.
Referenced in the podcast:
Dynamic Relationships: Unleashing the Power of Appreciative Inquiry in Daily Living
The Appreciative Facilitator: A Handbook for Facilitators and Teachers
(Mentioned around 22m12s) Comments on Youtube videos from people who have suffered when the Wholeness Principle hasn’t been honoured – see for example the comments by ‘socksumi’ on these videos by David Cooperrider and Jackie Kelm (not aimed at anything said in the videos, rather that the commenter has had a bad experience with ‘Appreciative Inquiry’ done badly).
The ‘above and below the line’ concept comes from this video:
Jackie Stavros and Cheri Torres Interview Transcript
Andy Smith: Welcome Cheri Torres and Jackie Stavros to the Positive Change Methods Podcast. Do you want to say a little bit about yourselves and your history with Appreciative Inquiry, first of all?
Jackie Stavros: Sure. I’ll just get started and I’ll lead you quickly up to my pathway with Cheri. So how did I learn about Appreciative Inquiry? It was way back in 1995. David Cooperrider at Case Western Reserve was teaching a qualitative research class called Appreciative Ways of Knowing. So there was no 4 or 5D cycle. It was just the principles. And Appreciative Inquiry was a way of doing inquiry. So he was one of my first research instructors. So we just learned how to ask, we called it back then ‘unconditional positive questions’. And today we call them generative questions. But that’s how I learned about Appreciative Inquiry. David became my dissertation chair a couple years later. And a couple years later, the Appreciative Inquiry 4D cycle actually emerged almost a decade after Appreciative Inquiry principles. So that’s a little bit of how I was, introduced to Appreciative Inquiry. And when I heard about it, I was like, this is the way to operate. This is the way to do research. It just became part of who I am and what I did. So I did have some wonderful opportunities while a doctorate student going on some projects with David, finishing up my dissertation using Appreciative Inquiry on capacity building and doing a lot of the practical stuff like the 4D cycle. And then I met Cheri. It was right after 9/11 in 2001. We were in Annapolis, Maryland. There was a conference and a woman named one of the, I like to call her the earlier AI practitioners, Dr. Marge Schiller introduced Cheri and I and we had a lot of chemistry and we really connected about how could we bring Appreciative Inquiry into our daily lives. And conversation started with Cheri and I. The first book we put together was Dynamic Relationships: Unleashing the Power of Appreciative Inquiry in Daily Living. As we kind of say we were force fitting this 4D cycle into relationships. And you know it was a good start for us. And when we, I left industry was in academia, was consulting and Cheri and I stayed in touch. And fast forward around, I don’t know, maybe it was around 2014, 15, we’re like “Do we want to do a second edition of Dynamic Relationships?” And what we learned is we wanted to do a second edition. And I like to see it now as a second attempt: “How do we bring Appreciative Inquiry into daily living?” So we were really blessed. Berrett-Koehler accepted our proposal for what we thought was the second edition. And the president of Berrett-Koehler was our editor and he really pushed us to think how you bring Appreciative Inquiry into daily living. And what happened through Cheri and I working on this is we realised it’s in and through our conversations. So really what came was the Conversations Worth Having book. How do you use Appreciative Inquiry for both productivity, productive and meaningful engagement? So that’s probably a 25 year history in a few minutes’s of how Cheri and I came together. So whether I’m teaching, parenting, consulting, I use Appreciative Inquiry.
Andy: Okay, Cheri, do you want to give us a parallel narrative to that?
Cheri Torres: So I was introduced to Appreciative Inquiry in the late 90s. I was at that time facilitating outdoor experiential education, doing leadership and team development through low and high ropes course activities. Those are activities designed so the only way people can succeed is by working together, and sharing leadership and really developing collaborative teamwork skills. And someone had just come from David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney’s first training out in Taos and he was an experiential trainer. And we were at a conference and they did an Open Space session because they were just on fire with this approach. And our approach to facilitation was a very positive one. We would look for what were people doing well and how could they do more of that? But at the time, my business partner and I were trying to teach other people to facilitate using that positive approach. And it was really difficult because people paid attention to when people made mistakes and wanted to invite them to fix those mistakes. And so trying to teach people to focus on when the teams were succeeding and when leadership emerged was challenging. So I went to this Open Space on Appreciative Inquiry and I was like, oh my goodness, here is the theory, here’s the methodology, now we can teach it to people. We took it back and integrated into all of our facilitation training, wrote a book on the, called The Appreciative Facilitator for teachers and experiential facilitators.
Andy: if I can just interject, my only experience of ropes work did very much suffer from the facilitator, ah, noticing what went wrong. And it is very demoralising when they do that.
Cheri Torres: Yes it is. And actually research shows for high functioning teams you can do that and they will learn and make changes. But for low functioning or dysfunctional teams focusing on that just makes it worse for them.
Andy: That’s interesting.
Cheri Torres: Yeah. So that appreciative approach, especially for dysfunctional teams, is really important.
Andy: Ooh, if you’ve got any research links that you can send me afterwards, I can stick them in the show notes for that because I haven’t come across that. That’s really interesting.
Cheri Torres: I will see if I can find it. That was a long time ago but actually I probably have it in the book so I’ll go back and find that for you. Anyway, our training went from three days, and people still didn’t get it, to a day and a half and they were facilitating and they were asking the questions and it was like light bulbs went on for people. It was like the reverse of the self fulfilling prophecy which people had always thought was negative and they’re like oh no, of course it works in the positive as well. And then I just, I dove headlong into the whole Appreciative Inquiry community, it felt like I found my people, and then met Jackie, and she kind of described our trajectory forward from there. In between when we wrote Dynamic Relationships and we decided to write another book, a lot of my work had focused on -although I did use the 4D process, the 5D process for strategic planning – when I was doing leadership development, I was still trying to focus on what is it that leaders can do. And at some point in that process, for me, it went from doing the 4Ds to what are they doing when they’re doing the 4Ds. And that kind of broke down into four elements: the inquiring, positive framing, designing, and doing continuous learning using AI as an action research approach to evolution.
Andy: Right. for listeners and in fact for me who is not entirely sure what action research is, do you want to describe that in a sentence?
Cheri Torres: Sure. Action research – and Jackie, you correct me if I get this wrong – but action research is a collaborative research approach to building research into the way you do business. So instead of taking something, studying it out there over a period of time and then analysing, it’s almost like the ‘plan, do, act, reflect’, ‘plan, do, act, reflect’, we’re going to build ongoing learning and development into what we do and it’s called action research. So you’re continuously looking at what are we doing well? What might we change? How can we be even better at what we’re doing? Let’s try that. So it’s this circular experimental thing.
Andy: And it’s also presumably taking into account that you can’t study something involving human beings without it affecting what you’re studying?
Cheri Torres: Yes. And Appreciative Inquiry at the outset was action research. At any rate those four practices. When we went to write the second book, our first effort was submitting four practices. And as Jackie said, our editor was just, he was amazing. The book would never been written without his continuous pushback. But Steve Piersanti said, you can’t have four practices. People won’t do four practices.
Andy: Too many?
Cheri: Yeah, way too many, twice too many. He said, if you can get it to one, that’s what I would love, but you can have two if you want. And he said, I need some sort of a graphic, a two by two that can explain what this is to people and very practical. Yeah. And I think we were three months trying to, we’d say, oh. And we kept trying to force it into relationships and he would, kept pushing back, ‘No, that’s not it’. You know, we were like, just tell us what it is. He said, I don’t know what it is, I just know what it’s not. and when we finally hit on oh, it’s the conversations we’re having and that develops the relationships as opposed to the other way around. And then we were off and running with the two practices of inquiry and positive framing. And at this point, if we had to boil it down to one, we would go with generative questions.
Andy: Okay.
Jackie Stavros: I just want to add something to what Cheri said that triggered something 25 years ago. If you’re doing research, and I remember as a young researcher, I said to David, so what’s my hypothesis – survey? You got to test things. It’s quantitative. He says, no, you’re going to do action research. He says, you have everything to learn and nothing to prove. And that’s – Cheri’s right. That’s what action research is. you. It’s messy and that’s – Appreciative inquiry started as a qualitative research technique. There was no 4 or 5D cycle at the time.
Andy: Yeah. I’ve often seen action research mentioned in the Appreciative Inquiry books and never been entirely clear on what it was previously. So that’s what it started as.
Cheri Torres: Yes.
Andy: Yeah. Ok.
Cheri Torres: And then people kept saying, well, this is great, but how do we bring it into organisations? How do we actually do this? And that’s – eventually the 4Ds emerged and then the 5Ds.
Andy: Yeah. So, I know you mentioned them in passing. Do you just want to make it explicit for the listeners what those two practices are? Because I mention this to my students a lot because I think it really distils, you know, four practices too many, five principles almost too many, really. Those two practices are really crucial, I think, for people understanding Appreciative Inquiry. So do you want to just make it explicit what those are?
Cheri Torres: Sure. So the first one is asking generative questions. And a generative question is one that widens your view. So it’s that whole notion of instead of going into a conversation or a relationship, counting on your assumptions and believing the stories you’re making up about what’s happening, it’s going in with this open curiosity of ‘what don’t I know? What are the questions that we need to ask together, or we need to ask each other that will widen our view?’ And they fall into four different categories. The first one is making the invisible visible. Those are things like assumptions, beliefs. What do you know that I don’t know? what are your hopes? And even asking myself, ‘what don’t I know?’ is a generative question to help make the invisible visible, or ‘why am I triggered?’ if you’re triggered by something someone has said. The second thing they do is they create shared understanding. So if I ask, ‘How do you see it?’ and ‘Where would you like this conversation to end up? What are we aiming for?’ And then I can share mine. We can be on the same page, or ‘how do you see the problem and the issue? What do you think is at the core? Is that a symptom or is that a -?’. So the whole point is to broaden the view and create a shared understanding and then we can move forward. The third thing a generative question does is, it generates new knowledge. So we might ask questions like, ‘how did you do this at your organisation before you came here? Or when your parents were parenting you, how did they manage this thing?’ Or a teacher with your students who are successful, ‘What is it that makes them successful?’ So, like opening up and finding new knowledge. And then the last one is inspiring possibilities, you know, asking the ‘what ifs’ and how might we, questions that really, create divergent conversation. Before we start to narrow in on where are we going to go, how are we going to do things? Jackie, you want to talk about the second practice?
Jackie Stavros: Yeah, I do. And, I just want to jump on something Cheri said. Curiosity, velocity. In the introduction of the book, David Cooperrider writes about, curious people know how to naturally ask generative types of questions. And those four items that Cheri mentioned, they build trust and that’s what strengthens relationships and puts you in the connect mode. So the questions are so powerful. I can ask you a question that can trigger you or I can ask you a question that can flourish you. So the second practice is positive framing. And positive framing – if you just flip the back of the book, the back cover of our book, positive framing is asking what you want more of. Asking what you wish to happen. Taking something negative, we talk about a story, something negative called, ‘poor statistics’. and the positive opposite of that, this is where we’re getting to framing, is positive statistics or positive stats. Well, if you have more of it, what is a frame? So a frame is ‘what are you looking for?’ It’s a statement. Well, we have a great team and you talk a great team, we have a great caring place. So you spend your time in the inquiry understanding what makes for a great team. So that frame that you go into the conversation with, it literally achieves the positive opposite. Great statistics, and it eclipses the problem that you originally started from. So positive framing is what do you want to happen? So the technique we use is we call it flipping: Name it, Flip it, Frame it. Name the problem, flip it to the positive opposite, and if that was true, what is the frame? And there could be multiple frames, but what is the frame the three of us want to really talk about and do inquirie?. So positive framing is the second practice.
Andy: Right, that’s lovely. Very clear explanations – as I’d expect actually from having read your book – and also that stuff that Cheri was saying about positive questions, sorry, generative questions. I’m currently writing a book on practical coaching with Appreciative Inquiry and I’m going to have to rethink the questioning part just slightly. Just to add some of that nuance, or some of that perspective. That’s great. Thank you very much. This is a learning experience, as we speak, which is wonderful.
Cheri Torres: If I could add something to, and I think this kind of addresses – Appreciative Inquiry often gets this like, “Oh, rose coloured glasses. You’re just going to focus on the positive”. And I want to underscore two things around asking generative questions and positive framing. It’s really important what Jackie said about starting with ‘what is the problem? What’s the issue?’ If there is one, it’s really important to name it. If you think of generative questions and if you think of Appreciative Inquiry as those conversations that add value or value what is, how important is it to point out when there’s a problem? It’s really important. Or if there are obstacles or things that might trip you up, it’s very important to point those out. But then as Jackie says, to go on to, “Okay, so how do we mitigate that? What is it that we want? Knowing that that might happen or knowing that that is happening, what do we actually want?” And so it isn’t putting on the rose coloured glasses as she said, when you achieve the positive frame, you resolve the problem or you eclipse it. And the second thing with generative questions along that same line, some people with Appreciative Inquiry get fearful of asking a question that might deepen what seems like the negative. and they’re like, “Oh, we can’t ask about, you know, the person who feels alienated, we can’t ask them what happened because that’s a negative question. And again go back to “Does this add value?” If by going to the person and saying “What happened?” If you’re building connection and strengthening a relationship and someone feels listened to, that adds value and so it doesn’t mean to stay in spin cycle and then get into that like, ‘oh yeah, it’s really awful’, but long enough to hear the person and then begin to ask generative questions that help move things forward. So for those of you that are listening, it’s not about asking the positive or being positive. It’s about having conversations that add value or value people in situations in ways that allow you to move forward.
Andy: Yeah. Sometimes you come across evidence of where people have tried to do Appreciative Inquiry or maybe claimed to do Appreciative Inquiry and they haven’t followed that idea, where they, you know, everyone’s got to pretend everything’s wonderful. There’s a, on YouTube, there’s an interview with David Cooperrider. And this is almost nothing to do with anything he said in the interview. It’s just to do with like Appreciative Inquiry. Some of the comments underneath are from people who seem like they’ve been put through a process where they work of Appreciative Inquiry and you know, the unions weren’t consulted and everyone had to sound positive, and so on. On. These guys are really bitter. Yeah, put. I’ll put a link to that because it’s a real example of what not to do, what to avoid, toxic positivity kind of thing. And in fact it violates the Wholeness Principle as well. recently, and I do this as well now, I think people like David Shaked, Okay. Hopefully he’ll be a guest in the future. I’ve got to learn to get that pronunciation right. He now seems to be talking about the wholeness principle, which is one of the emergent principles of Appreciative Inquiry, not one of the original five, on equal terms with the original five. And I absolutely agree with that. I think it’s really important that everyone is listened to.
Jackie Stavros: When you think of, there’s the five classic principles and the Wholeness Principle is what – you’re right that it was an ‘emergent’. The union example that David talks about, which he did some work with Diana (Whitney), is somehow they forgot to ask or invite the union in. So before you go into a 4D or the 5D cycle, you’ve got to spend time. Who do we need to invite into the conversation?
Andy: Yeah.
Jackie Stavros: Who’s going to be impacted by the decisions we make? If you bring in the people that are going to be part of it, then you wouldn’t have all that negativity afterwards because you forgot to invite them into the conversation.
Andy: Yeah, It’s that principle of “nothing about us without us”, isn’t it?
Cheri Torres: Yes, exactly. Yes. An interesting thing also, we’ve been in conversations with colleague, colleagues around, the role that the other AI is playing artificial intelligence. and in a conversation we had yesterday, it was really fascinating. And this speaks to the Wholeness Principle of not turning AI into an it, but seeing it as another part of the team that brings us data and knowledge that, not be the answer, but can be, part of the equation. Yeah, part of the equation and part of the team to see it as a part of the whole. And that Wholeness Principle of, not just the internal organisation but the wholeness of our natural systems. How are we augmenting everything these days and not just our own pocketbooks?
Andy: Hmm, yeah, I am unconvinced by, well, the large language model version of AI. I’m not talking about expert systems in, like, medicine and science, which seem to do very well, but the, the one that just like, makes stuff up and produces marketing slop and so on. It would be like, I’m sceptical about this because it would be like having a team member that, you know, you can’t trust everything they say. Occasionally it lies, but it says it’s not. It’s making out everything it does is the truth. I was trying to find a statistic yesterday about the effectiveness of training and how long it lasted. And there are just loads of articles out there now, generated by AI, where it’s referencing scientific papers, research, and you follow the link and either the research is about something else altogether or it doesn’t – the page doesn’t exist and it hallucinates. I am deeply sceptical. Again, it probably comes from hanging out on BlueSky, where there’s like loads of writers and artists and musicians who absolutely hate the whole idea of AI because it’s kind of stealing their jobs completely. But I’m open to be convinced it may have some value somewhere.
Cheri Torres: Yeah, I think it’s really nascent. and I think if we engage with it, not just trusting everything that comes out of its mouth, I mean, we don’t do that with people either. you know, people hallucinate, often, sometimes as well. They see things that are – they make stuff up, and it’s always bringing that element of like, oh, that’s an interesting idea, let’s do a little more research. Or let’s not just use one AI platform. Let’s – you know, I think the more we can be in relationship to it as opposed to either it’s everything or we have to put it at arm’s length, the better it’s going to get because it will keep learning from us just as we learn from it.
Andy: Yeah. I’m probably also resisting the cognitive load of actually having to learn how to interact with it because it’s not so relevant to what I do with individuals and teams. So it’s probably. you know, larger organisation change and data crunching and stuff, maybe more to it there.
Jackie Stavros: Yeah, I think.
Cheri Torres: And it’s only as good as the questions you ask. So getting really good at asking generative questions with specificity around a particular frame really supports what kind of data and information you get back.
Andy: Yeah, yeah.
Cheri Torres: Yeah.
Andy: Okay, let’s move on from this. Yes, let’s move on from this area of slight disagreement and yeah. What you going to say, Cheri?
Cheri Torres: I was going to say one of the things that is important and relevant to what we were just talking about, but it’s really also relevant to any kind of a conversation, is being in a place of intentionality as opposed to reaction. And so that’s another area for people to be able to be conscious, and intentional with their conversations as opposed to just starting, just talk from wherever they are emotionally and mentally.
Andy: Yeah, yeah. And I’m thinking about perhaps ‘what do I want to happen’ rather than ‘how are things acting on me?’ I’ll give you a quick example. I had a coaching client years ago who, every week – she was like a marketing manager for one of the big corporations. And every week she had this meeting and she told me she hated those meetings. She felt terribly self conscious. I asked her what was going through her mind in the meeting and generally it was ‘am I going to be found out?’ And so she was worried about what they thought of her and so on. And so I asked her ‘would it be okay to like stop going to the meetings if they’re that bad?’ You know, would it make a difference if you didn’t go? And she was like ‘oh no, I absolutely have to be there’. So I invited her to focus on what she wanted to get from that meeting and how she wanted it to go. And she came back next week and I asked her how it went. She said ‘oh it’s great, they all agree with me and all my proposals went through’. And so just because – I think I got really lucky here – but, her attention was focused outwards on the other people looking for signs of, ‘are they going the way I want to go or do I need to say something else?’ rather than internally ‘what are they thinking of me?’ So it just made me think of that.
Jackie Stavros: Yeah. No, but you were coaching her in the Appreciative Inquiry principles. ‘What do you want to see happening?’ language. So that’s why I think it worked out well.
Andy: Yeah. This was before I’d heard of Appreciative Inquiry as well, so.
Cheri Torres: Well, it’s probably why AI resonated with you, because it’s the way you coached. Yeah.
Andy: Yeah, well, I came from originally an NLP background, which is – there are some shared assumptions, roughly. But it’s very different in that with NLP, you’re like a skilled mechanic fixing a car engine or something, whereas with Appreciative Inquiry, the people you’re facilitating are the experts on their own lives and the ideas come from them. So it’s a very different approach, but some shared assumptions there. Yeah. So you wrote Conversations Worth Having, the book, which we can just see on the bookshelf behind your shoulder there, Cheri. Which is great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bring it out so people can sit. In fact, I think it’s into the second edition now?
Cheri Torres: Yeah. And that includes that new chapter on tuning in. That’s the, you know, pause, breathe, and get curious before you start to engage and talk.
Andy: Ah, right. Okay. Yeah, I’ve got the first edition, so I’ve not seen that. So. But I do see other things, occasionally coming out and little blog items or little ideas for techniques or little courses and things. What’s particularly interesting you at the moment, or what are you particularly proud of that you’ve come out with recently? What do you want to share with people?
Jackie Stavros: Well, I’d like to share how we started and all these things and why they came up. So we wrote the book and our first website. You’ve written a book? It was all about the book. And what began to happen is a group from California, the West part of the US they wanted training in Conversations Worth Having. Not just training and what it is and how to do it, but they wanted to take our material and train other people. So we put together the boot camps, and, it was Conversation Bootamp and the Strategic Conversation Bootamp. And then they wanted us to certify them. And certification is more than a certificate, but we had them work on a couple projects, we had an assessment and essay. And so we were very fortunate to get both the David L. Cooperrider Centre for Appreciative Inquiry and the Centre for Appreciative Inquiry behind this certification. So that’s how the training began. And then we did on demand self directed training and customised boot camps. And as we certified these people, we began to write what we call Quick Start guides. And Quick Start Guides are 20, 30 pages. The first one we did was a Quick Start Guide, how to use conversations worth having in performance review and evaluations. And the next one that just came out about a month ago is – we had four other certified trainers, one from the United Kingdom, Jane Woods, one from Canada, Deb Connors, one from the West Coast, Silvette Wake, and gosh, we got the East coast covered which was Elle Finnegan. And we all came together and brought a Quick Start guide on conversations with yourself and how to build resilience. so these products are coming up because we have people who are really immersed in Conversations Worth Having and they want to quickly get it out there in a specific topic or area. And then the big thing we did this year is we did an ‘On Demand’ I like to call, it’s an under 30 minute programme that’s very inexpensive for I call it the do it yourselfers that want to learn about what we were talking about and begin using it immediately, in their day to day work with their families and with their teams. And Cheri is probably, I would call her our blog queen. She writes the most blogs. But her blog, she’s very creative but you can go look at our blogs and we’ve got lots of blogs written by people in our community, a situation or an issue using Conversations Worth Having and then even a game called ‘Shift This!’. So we didn’t plan to do anything I just talked about, but write a book and maybe do some training. But we’re kind of being pulled out there in the universe. Could you do this? Could you do that? So that’s all the things we’re doing. Did I forget anything, Cheri?
Cheri Torres: No.
Andy: Yeah. So, this sounds like what I come across sometimes that you know obviously about Appreciative Inquiry and particularly the Conversations Worth Having kind of slant, not slant, but you know, that facet of it. And then you have people coming to that with their own areas of expertise. They learn about that and the cross fertilisation creates something that you wouldn’t have thought of yourself because you’re not an expert in that area. I’ve found that with Appreciative Inquiry all the time, that people bring their own experience and areas of expertise and they do stuff with Appreciative Inquiry I would never have thought of.
Cheri Torres: Yeah. Secondly. Yeah, yeah, it’s wonderful like that. We have learned so much as we watch people who go through the training, and then the certification and they integrate it into the fabric of what they’re doing. And so it doesn’t look just like the training. It looks like whatever they do where the practices enhance whether it’s strengths, training or emotional intelligence, Lean and Agile development. I mean it’s woven in. People were weaving it in everywhere.
Andy: So yeah, my interviewee a couple of weeks ago, Wendy Burton, who’s – she works in healthcare, sort of helping struggling teams to turn themselves around. She uses Appreciative Inquiry with Lean. She uses emotional intelligence stuff to prepare herself for working with challenging groups. Yeah, these things really do cross fertilise and the areas can learn from each other I think. The approaches can learn from each other.
Cheri Torres: Yes, they most certainly can.
Andy: So what’s coming up for you? What’s your next kind of project, thing, that you’re going to release upon the world?
Cheri Torres: Well, that is a really great question. we have a number of additional Quick Start guides that are people are wanting to put forth. One is Conversations Worth Having for wellbeing in the workplace, and then there is another one on Conversations Worth Having with AI.
Jackie Stavros: The other AI.
Andy: Yeah. I’ve stopped calling Appreciative Inquiry ‘AI’ now because it only means one thing to 99% of people.
Cheri Torres: That is so true.
Andy: Yeah.
Cheri Torres: And that’s with a group of people that work with tech leaders and engineers and you know, AI is in the fabric of what and how they do things. And so being able to make sure that conversation is woven into that is really vital. And I think they’re probably – we’ve started extending our efforts into the whole regenerative business arena. That a way to get started into regenerativity or that businesses that give back more than they take, begins with your conversations and changing the conversation. So we’ve done a fair amount of research. We have an article coming out in the November AIP, on how changing your conversations within an organisation supports becoming a generative organisation and that generativity, eventually, if people stay in generative conversations, moves into regenerativity because you just keep seeing the system as incorporating more and more until it’s one fabric we’re all working on.
Andy: Okay. Amazing. Is there a particular – if the listener hasn’t heard, well, not hasn’t heard, but is not very familiar with Appreciative Inquiry. Is there a little thing that you can share with them that they could try at work or even in their lives, which they can maybe see a result from quickly? What would you like to share with people?
Jackie Stavros: if you’re asking for something quickly. I think the most important thing to do, if you’re excited to do it or if you can think about doing this, if you feel triggered by something or shutting down, is – we talk about a habit of learning to tune in. Cheri mentioned it. Just. if I say to you, ‘just pause and take a deep breath’, I’m resetting you to be in a space of appreciation and being curious and then trying to ask a generative question and say, you know, “Andy, what do you think about it? Cheri, what do you think?”. ‘How might we’ questions. ‘How might we move forward together?’ Or my favourite question is, ‘what are your wishes?’ And really listen to the answer, to the person you’re asking the question. That means you’re tuned in. You’re really listening to them. I think that’s the easiest way to get started.
Cheri Torres: And I think if you ask yourself, ‘what don’t I know?’ Then all of a sudden there’s a host of questions you could ask. It’s like, oh, I don’t really know for certain. This, this, this, this. maybe I should check that out. So there’s a generative question. And if I could just share a short – it doesn’t have to be complicated – I want to just share a real quick story about my first experience asking a generative question and getting started with AI. I went to the second training that Cooperrider and Diana Whitney did, and at the end of… It was five days, at the end of the four days, they had a wine and cheese party. And you know, we’re all talking to each other. We’ve been spending four days talking about the positive and asking the unconditional positive question. And I was talking to the head administrator at the hospital, and he was going on and on about how doctors were prima donnas and they weren’t team players, and he was trying to get this team thing initiated in the hospital and they didn’t want to participate. And suddenly, in the middle of listening to him, I thought, what are we doing? Here’s that non-appreciative conversation. And so when there was a pause, I thought, I’m going to try this generative question thing out and see if it really is, if it works. And all I asked was, ‘Do you have any doctors that are on board?’ And I watched his entire body language change. He stood up, his shoulders went back, he got his whole face lit up, eyes. And, what I heard was, ‘I have 15 of the most amazing doctors’. And he started then to tell me about them and I didn’t, I’m not sure that I ever heard because inside I was going, ‘oh, my goodness, this is really powerful’. That simple question changed the entire dynamic.
Jackie Stavros: Yeah.
Andy: Yeah. This is what we’re doing with Appreciative Inquiry, isn’t it? Those doctors were there the whole time, but he’d kind of forgotten about them or talking about as if they weren’t there. And because as humans, we do focus more on the negative, it carries more weight with us, so we’re kind of just restoring the other half of the picture and putting things back in perspective.
Jackie Stavros: You know in chapter three of our book, we mentioned, tuning in in this video clip by the Conscious Leadership Group. And it’s are you above or below below the line. And it says we are hardwired to be and go below the line. And, on page 159 in our book, Sheri and I have a caveat. We all have the ‘ain’t it awful’ moments. You’re going to have it. So the question is, does it take you 3 minutes, 3 weeks, 3 days, 30 hours to get back into that appreciative space? It takes time. So, be easy on yourself when you fall below the line.
Andy: Yeah, maybe that’s a good place, to close the interview. that’s a nice note to end on. thank you so much. It’s been, I’ve learned a huge amount, and, it’s been great. so thank you, Cheri Torres and Jackie Stavros.
Jackie Stavros: Thank you, Andy.
Cheri Torres: Yeah, thanks for having us.
