[SOUND] Let's go through this just with some visuals. Whether this is a group of ten or a group of 100 or 50 or whatever, you begin with the relevant stake holder voices in the room and you assign them to max-mix groupings. You would have different functions assigned at a table or different gender or different age in the organization or internal, external union management. Whatever the important differences are in your setting, you intentionally mix people in tables of, let's say six or eight, or in a small group, maybe four or six. Then, once they're at that table, you begin with the discovery interview. You've all done that, you have that experience. You can get a feel for what that would be. People can pair off, use the space they're in and have the sharing of stories and the sharing of future ideal images. They come back to their table and now the pairs are sharing with other pairs what were the common underline success factors in the questions that were about the past and this is where the inquiry actually happens. We're creating the positive affect that you all saw when you did your interview. We're creating that affect in the room and we're now actually digging, we're exploring. What are all the life-giving forces or underlying success factors that help us be at our best so far with our topic? Then we post the summary of those strengths or best practices to preserve or the answers to the continuity question, what is it we want to keep while we are changing and transforming into the future? These photographs just show rooms of stakeholders where people at tables have reported what their key strengths are and they're posting them up in some fashion, so that everybody can be reminded of them. Now we move to the dream stage. Again, each table is a combination of pairs who did interviews. They are invited to go deeper into the most attractive future images that they agree on at their table and then we often ask them to find some creative, kinetic way of showing their images. Not just having one representative stand up and talk or point to a flip chart but actually getting up and doing something that demonstrates some aspect of their preferred future vision. Remember, this is where we fill the space with imagery. We don't try to vote on the best presentation or narrow it down to one image. We just fill the space with imagery. Then, we ask the tables or the subgroups to come up with actionable ideas or actionable ways that we could begin moving from today toward the future images that their table is most attracted to. There's a brainstorming. They may generate two, three, four, five actionable ideas and then, we use a simple mapping process. You go around table one, what's your most preferred idea, your number one? Table two, your number one? Table three, your number one? You just draw lines out on a chart, write down a headline. By the time you're through the first round, you're on to some people's number two priority. Usually, two times around the room, you've got 90% of the top three that people generate. You don't have to be neat and careful about the mapping. It's organic. You can just take any surface like the one you see here, write the topic in the middle and then as each table talks, just draw a spoke and put their idea on the spoke. Then you can invite everybody, give them five sticky dots or three sticky dots, and invite them to come up and vote. Which of these actionable ideas should be the priority ones that we go after first? This is just another picture from a different organization of an opportunity map. What I loved about this picture is this is the actual map that was developed in the session. I took this photograph two and a half years after the session. The map was bolted up on the dock. This is a trucking company. There have been no graffiti. There's no protective surface over it. It just became an artifact of a different way of working together, union and management, and they were proud of it, so they put it out there as a reminder. In the design phase, so we've located the highest priority actionable ideas and then we invite all the people to get up from their subgroups and go walk to the one of those top priority that they most want to work on. You vote with your feet. You choose based on your interest, your connection with the idea. And you find yourself in a new team and that's now the new change initiative team, and we begin the design phase. We often now have another round of brainstorming, detail ways we can implement this idea and brainstorm all kind of ideas, look for connections and groupings of the ideas. Create rapid prototypes, multidimensional representations of some part of your project, or your envisioned change scenario. Also, do some action planing. What are we going to do next? When are we going to meet? Who else do we have to talk to? Simple but basic questions to help clarify who does what next as we move into the destiny implementation phase. Coming back to our cycle, there's specific products or outcomes throughout the road map here. At the end of discovery, you have posted around your group or in your workspace, the strengths, the life-giving factors that people discovered overlapped their stories. Things that we should preserve, hold onto and leverage as we go through the dream design destiny phase. When you move from dream to design, you have some kind of a representation of the best change ideas that people have come up with based upon the anticipatory future images that they were most attracted to. Whether you call it an opportunity map or it's simply a listing of things, you list them and then you let people vote, so you can determine, are there 7 out of 50 or 4 out of 20 that are the real attractors? They have the most traction in that group and then you invite people to reform teams of their choosing around those high priority action ideas. Now you're ready for the design phase, and coming out of that are specific action plans and prototypes with what we call aspiration or possibility statements. It's like a change goal statement for that particular initiative. And then the destiny or sometimes it's called the delivery phase or deployment is the actual implementation. You can see through this road map that one of the qualities of appreciative inquiry is, and again, remember, this can be with a small group of 8, 10, 12 or a much larger group but the characteristic here is that we move from an appreciative look at what's helping us do our best so far. We use that to create new images of possibility. Then from the possibilities, we form self-managing teams made up of the stakeholders we brought together who then do the design and commit themselves to the implementation. At the design phase, you might be working on, let's say, four key action ideas to move forward. In each of those newly formed teams, you'd find managers and non-managers. You'd find various functions, you'd find external and internal. But the same stakeholder mix that started the process, now reforms into self-guiding teams, including the leadership. It's not the leaders standing back and saying, when you get to the destiny phase, give us your plans as a recommendation and then we'll act on them. In the appreciative inquiry road map in this cycle, you build in the commitment and the legitimacy of the action as you're going. The leaders themselves have chosen different actionable ideas to work on, to do the design and to do the implementation. Going back to our first slide for this session, one of the things a successful change leader needs is a road map, a way that people can share knowing where we are in a process. This is the road map for appreciative inquiry. [MUSIC]
