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Ever heard the phrase: it's not what you say, it's the way that you say it? This observation gets to the heart of Appreciative Inquiry, an engagement technique with the potential to change the way people within an organization talk to each other. Here, Sam Berrisford describes how this simple technique not only involved employees in change at the BBC, but placed them in the driving seat of a major cultural transformation.
An engagement technique to change organizational dialogue
Appreciative Inquiry (AI) uses structured dialogue to generate a collective image of a new and better future for an organization. It explores the best of what is within the organization and what has been before. It attaches an element of formality to the process of learning from organizational experience and is, critically, forward-looking and positive. In practice, AI can take many forms, although its most vigorous exponents Cooperrider & Srivastva, strive to maintain the integrity of the formal process. In their 1987 article "Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life" they describe the process in detail.
Put simply, you ask people what's good about their organization and how it could be made even better, rather than asking them "what's wrong?" The negative framing of this question tends to generate the very issues and problems you're trying to understand and resolve. Ideally, AI breaks this cycle of negative thinking, unlocks experience and knowledge, and releases the creativity and development potential of the organization.
Appreciative Inquiry and the BBC
We have to watch our terminology at the BBC. In addition to Appreciate Inquiry, AI also stands for Appreciation Index - a standard measure of audience reaction to a program (the higher the AI, the more appreciated the program). In IT research AI stands for artificial intelligence, and in animal husbandry it refers to artificial insemination. There's also some debate within the BBC about the spelling of "inquiry" which many regard as a misspell of "enquiry." (A call to our pronunciation unit and a consultation with the OED attaches equal value to both spellings, hence "inquiry" is used in this article).
Concern around meaning and usage of language reflects the kind of culture that exists within the BBC. It's doubtful, for example, we could have introduced a process...