Continuing a series on how to use Appreciative Inquiry in practice, this week’s episode of the Positive Change Methods podcast is all about ‘provocative propositions’.
The episode includes:
- What provocative propositions are
- Some ideas for what else to call them if you need to adapt to your client’s culture
- Using provocative propositions with a team
- A checklist for successful provocative propositions (including what to avoid)
- Some real-life examples from Appreciative Inquiry implementations
- Using provocative propositions in large-scale organisational change
- An example of how to develop a provocative proposition in an Appreciative Inquiry with 35 people
- An NLP-powered exercise to help you make your personal Dream more compelling and motivating, and develop a provocative proposition for it
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Transcript
Provocative Propositions are short statements that describe the desired future. They should be vivid and compelling, so that people feel inspired to make them happen. They describe the destination, rather than specifying how to get there. Some client cultures may find a different name, like “possibility statements”, “purpose statements”, or “stretch statements” easier to relate to.
Using Provocative Propositions with a Team
In an appreciative team development workshop, provocative propositions serve a couple of purposes.
They encapsulate the Dream and serve as an easy to remember reminder for everyone of where to get to.
They also represent an ideal to live up to, and a direction that’s a stretch to work towards, even when the team or organisation doesn’t yet always reach what they aspire to. That’s what makes them provocative.
In a day’s appreciative team development workshop, you can just ask the participants to come up with one or more slogans or straplines that sum up their Dream, either while they are creating their artwork, or immediately afterwards.
Checklist for Successful Provocative Propositions
Ideally the provocative proposition creates powerful images in people’s minds, because, as the Anticipatory Principle says, organisations and people grow in the direction of their positive images of the future. So the wording of your provocative proposition is important. Here’s a checklist for strong, vivid propositions.
Is your proposition:
- Affirmative? – it needs to be positively stated, about what you want rather than what you don’t want
- Stretching? – it needs to challenge people and the organisation to raise their game (hence ‘provocative’) but still be achievable
- Stated in the present tense? – to make it easier for people to associate into and imagine
- Exciting? To make the proposition statement as exciting and vivid as possible:
- avoid abstract concepts (like ‘business benefit’ or ‘stakeholder value’) and jargon verbiage (like ‘leverage our capabilities’)
- instead, use simple, evocative, sensory specific words so that they form pictures or tell stories
- use the active rather than the passive voice
- make sure it reflects and resonates with the core life giving factors and values that you identified in the Discovery stage.
- Grounded in real-life examples of the best of current practice? Because the proposition is more convincing and feels more real if you can point to examples of where it is already beginning to happen.
Examples of Provocative Propositions
So I asked around some years back in Appreciative Inquiry forums for examples of provocative propositions from real life,and here are a few of them:
“The bishop visited our church today, and she brought her girlfriend with her” – this is an example shared by Tim Slack of Appreciating people in the UK from a church group in Liverpool.
“We are easy to get to know” – example shared by Mike Sands from the Unitarian Church of Vancouver. Mike adds, ”When I first heard it I was not very impressed. Later I had a chance to work with a group of people in making specific plans to make it so. It turned out to be challenging, engaging, uniting, simple, elegant, powerful. It uncovered an enduring ideal.”
Here are some from a sequence about customer service quoted in the Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry by Sue Annis Hammond:
“Our customers have a pleasant experience when they talk to us”.
“We anticipate their needs and have the information available when they call”
”The information we need to answer their questions is available to us with the touch of a finger”
Here’s another one from a church group – Appreciative Inquiry is really popular with church groups, especially in North America but also in the UK:
“We open doors for children to fall in love with Jesus” - from the All Saints Catechesis programme (I hope I pronounced that correctly). Shared by Rob Voyle of the Clergy Leadership Institute for Coaching and Training in Appreciative Inquiry.
Here’s an interesting one: “We look after the spare tank.” This is shared by Mike Holdstock of procoach.org, who comments: “The group were going from being supervised or having a manager to being a self managing work group. The spare tank they were referring to was the departing supervisor’s role of ensuring that there was always backup, whether it be paperclips or people during the holidays. Very special to this group, incomprehensible to anyone else. So provocative propositions don’t need to mean anything to people outside of the group that that it’s intended for. Finally, probably my favourite, this is one that didn’t arise from an appreciative inquiry process and isn’t stated in the present tense, although it does have a date on it:
“Achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” This is President John F. Kennedy in 1961, alking about the moonshot. A lot of people didn’t think that was possible. However, they did just squeak it in before the end of the decade. I remember as a small child in 1969, looking up at the moon and thinking, “Wow, there are people up there!”
Using Provocative Propositions in Large-Scale Organisational Change
When we move up from team level to dealing with larger-scale organisational change, the Appreciative Inquiry literature uses provocative propositions in different ways, and at different stages in the 5-D cycle.
For example, in the Appreciative Inquiry Handbook For Leaders Of Change by David Cooperrider, Diana Whitney and Jacqueline Stavros, provocative propositions are the output of the Design stage, and are crafted by the core team steering the Appreciative Inquiry process after identifying the internal and external relationships that help build the positive core, and examining the themes coming out of the Discovery stage.
By contrast, in Appreciative Inquiry: Change At The Speed Of Imagination by Jane Magruder Watkins and Bernard Mohr, they seem to be describing two types of provocative propositions. The first is a ‘written image’ produced by a group in the Dream stage to complement their ‘visual image’ – pretty similar to the slogan or strapline I suggested you ask your team to create in the previous section, although some of the examples they give are substantial paragraphs rather than punchy one-liners. They call these statements that encapsulate the Dream ‘macro provocative propositions’.
The second type of provocative propositions they talk about are more detailed, and are formulated as a basis for the Design stage, as guidelines for how each part of the organisation needs to develop and restructure in order to make the Dream a reality. These more detailed kinds of provocative proposition involve more of an analytical approach, undertaken by project teams for each area or AI consultants working with the people involved in the restructure. That more analytic approach is probably necessary to keep track of the complexity of large-scale organisational redesign.
For team performance improvement, we are more likely to get richer, more engaging, relatable, and inspiring possibility statements if they are created by the team themselves while they are in the creative flow of creating the visual expression of their Dream.
At a slightly larger scale than team level, here’s a method I’ve used working with a whole organisation of about 35 people. In this case we called the provocative proposition a ‘Possibility Statement’ to better fit the company culture.
Right after the Dream stage (or perhaps at the boundary of Dream and Design), I put up two flip chart pages: one with a checklist of the qualities the Possibility Statement should have:
- Positively stated
- Present tense
- Vivid and inspiring
- A stretch
The other page suggested some starting points for the wording:
- We are…
- <Organisation name> is like…
- What we do and/or how we do it
- What’s important about our work the highest purpose of our work
You could have more than one Possibility Statement, for example one for each department or project team.
To me, it makes sense to craft provocative propositions during or right after the Dream – people are still inspired, and the propositions are at a similar big-picture level of abstraction to the Dream vision.
The propositions can then act as a bridge into the more detailed work of the Design stage, as participants collaborate in designing what has to be in place to make the various elements of the Dream actually happen.
Try This Exercise
Take the challenge that you reframed into an affirmative topic at the end of the Definition chapter – or specify a new affirmative topic if things have moved on.
- Ask yourself: “What will it be like when <your desired future> is fully achieved, beyond my wildest dreams?”
- When you have an image of that dream, or even just a sense of it, step into it. What do you see? What do you hear? What does it feel like? Imagine it as fully as you can.
- Make any changes or improvements to your dream that you need to in order to make it feel as good as possible.
- Step out of the dream (after all, you’re not there yet, and you want to make it happen in reality rather than just dream about it) but leave it in your future. Notice how strongly you want to get there – and make any further changes you need to (maybe make the colours brighter or add some movement or sound) to make it even more attractive and motivating.
- Write a provocative proposition to sum up your dream – something that’s written in the present tense, is stretching, and makes you feel motivated to live up to it and make the dream happen in reality.
If you want everything I know about facilitating Appreciative Inquiry with teams and small groups, in one handy place for easy reference, get my book Practical Appreciative Inquiry: How to Use This Leading-Edge Coaching Method Confidently with Teams and Small Groups.
It’s available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook formats.
