Appreciative Leadership The Art of Asking Powerful Questions

1
Appreciative LeadershipThe Art of Asking
Powerful Questions
2
Goals for the Day

• Understand the concept of Appreciative Leadership
• Learn about tools to create powerful questions -
  that lead to discovery and possibilities
• Apply appreciative inquiry to situations and
  current challenges your organization faces

3
Appreciative Inquiry

• The best way to define AI is to offer these two
  questions as a starting point
• What problems are you having?
• What is working around here?
• What are the possible implications of these
  alternative perspectives?
• Can you fix a community, organization, or even
  the world, by focusing on and doing more of what
  works well?

4
Questions To Consider

• What is right about your community what can you
  build on to promote your mission and vision?
• Call-out your responses

5
A Leaders Role in Planning
6
ConstructionLess to More Powerful

• Who? What? How? Which?
• When? Where?
• Why?

7
Construction

• Construction The linguistic construction of a
  question can make a critical difference in either
  opening or closing our minds or narrowing the
  possibilities we consider.

• Consider the progression
• - Are you satisfied with your work?
• - When have you been most satisfied with your
  work?
• - What about your work do you find most
  satisfying?
• - Why do you believe your work is satisfying?

8
Scope

• The scope of the question must meet the need
  being addressed. Is the scope at the team,
  coalition, or community level?

• What needs our immediate attention as a team?
• What needs our immediate attention as a
  coalition?
• What needs our immediate attention as a
  community?

9
Built-In Assumptions

• What went wrong and who is responsible?
• How can we compete with this agency?
• How can we create a bilingual education system?

• Be careful about the assumptions that you bring
  to the question.

10
Questions For All Seasons

• Questions for Focusing Collective Attention on
  Your Situation
• Questions for Connecting Ideas and Finding Deeper
  Insight
• Questions That Create Forward Movement

11
Table Activity

• Pair up at your tables Person A and Person
  B
• Person A talks for 3 minutes about a
  challenge/problem they face related to their
  mission
• Person B listens and then selects or crafts a
  question that a leader could ask to move the
  challenge from a problem to a possibility focus
• Switch and repeat

12
Goals for the Day

• Understand the concept of Appreciative Leadership
• Learn about tools to create powerful questions -
  that lead to discovery and possibilities
• Apply appreciative inquiry to situations and
  current challenges your organization faces

13
The Challenge of Appreciative Leadership

• Our challenge is to create an appreciative
  leadership style
• You can begin today
• Good frame to great frame
• Look for the possibilities If I believe it,
  I can see it
• Discovery, Dream, Design, Destiny
• Craft and use these powerful questions

14
For More Information
Visit the Self-Help network website at
www.selfhelpnetwork.wichita.edu Click on One
Kansas