APPRECIATIVE QUESTIONS

If you talk to most leaders today, they will usually tell you that they can find themselves in the following statements:

1. I want to be known through my relationships with others and with the organisation, not just as a 'role'.

2. I want to be heard, to matter, to feel like I count, that my thoughts and feelings are of vital importance to those I work with.

3. I want to share my dreams, and to dream together, and to co-create something of value from those shared dreams while at work.

4. I want to not only do what I'm told, but have latitude to choose how and where I contribute. I want to volunteer my passion.

While virtually all leaders are enthusiastic in affirming the above aspirations, most would also concede that most workplaces and even most teams are far away from being 'labs' for or incubators of, the above.

The four aspirations above are part of a spiriting new leadership approach called Appreciative Inquiry. Like virtually everything of value, it has antecedents, it is legitimised by the tradition it builds on (consciously or unconsciously) and continues.

Arguably that tradition got its first real experiential as well as conceptual sponsorship from M.Scott Peck's (the ground-breaking author of The Road Less Travelled and The Different Drum among others) work on community-building.

By 'community', Dr. Peck meant a group of people who had not obliterated their differences but had genuinely transcended them. People who had come together to first 'know' each other, and then anchored in that authenticity and shared knowledge, could work creatively, passionately and powerfully together.

The first stage that Dr. Peck identified is 'pseudo-community'. This is where we all pretend that we already accept and appreciate each other. It is a period of cloying, candy-coloured fakeness. It is an artificial sweetness. 'Bullshit' would not be too harsh a description. 'Your call is important to us' repeated to the point of exasperation, followed by a semi-conscious salesperson who can help you with nothing but joyfully punctuates your frustration with 'have a nice day', is the epitome of this. 'Pseudo-service', 'pseudo-kindness', pseudo-community. I refer to instances where we repeat platitudes rather than communicate; when we manipulate rather than connect; or when we recite options microwaved from a pre-set script rather than really trying to help.

The second stage Dr. Peck called 'chaos'. Here he brought to our attention that the only way to escape from the sugary death above is to get real. And that will be initially jarring and uncomfortable. We have to realise that conflict is okay, and our leadership challenge is to make it constructive, ensure that it's on behalf of things that matter. In ancient Sparta, truth was determined (or so it is said) by who could shout the loudest. There is a lot of ancient Sparta in today's modern politics and media alas. But chaos is where something 'real' is expressed, depth not just volume. And we are willing to hang in there with each other, past the pain and upset, to some 'opening', to a measure of shared growth. This is leadership's ultimate challenge and perhaps most profound demonstration.

The third stage is called 'emptiness'. Scott Peck did not mean that this was a vacancy, rather it was the creation of new space between people. My wife Leslie and I saw the Pulitzer Prize winning play DOUBT this last week-end at home in New York. It is about the 'conflict' between certainty and doubt. In this clash of wills and world-views between a conflicted and loving priest and a fixated yet fiercely resolute sister, the author leaves us to make up our own mind about who was right. Did the priest abuse the boy? Did the sister initiate an unsubstantiated witch-hunt? Do children need the clarity of an intellectual and moral compass from their teachers primarily, or do they need kindness and understanding? By being 'willing' to doubt, to not know, to say 'yes' to the mystery of leadership and life, we practise emptiness. We let go of our 'masks', of our need to be right, and to have others agree with us and be just like us.

And finally, we come to community itself. A fascinating achievement for a group of people, community is where we are simultaneously aware of both task and process. We are committed to our targets, aims and goals, but we are acutely aware of the process we are following in trying to make them real. Are we doing it together? Are we communicating? Are we building people's talents and capabilities up en route to making this happen? Is the way we are interacting creating a culture that will institutionalise who we want to be? Is how we are embarking on this task making the next task, the next achievement, easier or harder?

Dr. Peck's work here found companionship and extension in the work of Peter Senge of MIT and his colleagues. Senge, famous for popularising the term 'learning organisation, has written voluminously on all kinds of aspects of leadership. But for our purposes there, three glitter most.

One, is again the fascination with 'space'. Community building is in a sense the creating of 'space' for ideas and interactions and possibilities and dreams and challenges...all of it. Peter Senge and his colleagues talk about first understanding 'what is'. And this means genuinely listening, creating a clearing for different visions of reality, for different stories.

Second, Peter Senge and his colleagues consider communication at its best to be about 'meaning-making'. That means we create meaning by how we interact. The deeper the communication, the richer the meaning. We light a fire in each other, we invent scenarios we want to live into. Senge and his colleagues have been at the forefront of co-creating multiple scenarios of the future as a way to help people collaboratively look at the implications of today's actions on tomorrow's outcomes.

Third, and perhaps most critically, the approach that Senge & co. have created is about 'sensing' the future, the possibility, the potential, that is trying to emerge. This sounds almost mystical until you experience it. In this way, there is a future trying to 'get out', to manifest, that synthesises our perspectives and hopes. It has to be sensed, and partnered with, oxygenated and kindled.

When we were fishing for a name for our own company, we flirted with a number of them. But as we started listening to each other and sharing our values and convictions, we started hearing things like: 'Blend of east and west; facilitating rather than telling; co-creating with clients; not being 'experts', but guides for their journey; a teacher who nurtures you... And from my martial arts training and time in Japan, the word 'Sensei' emerged. And the moment my partners heard it, they said: 'That's it!' They liked its enigmatic sound, its pristine simplicity, what it evoked and connoted. We didn't create the name, we almost 'rediscovered' it in our context.

When we listen broadly as well as deeply enough, we pick up patterns and clues, lattice-works of possibility. And if we can unify them, see how they connect and inter-relate, then we are building on this aptitude. The pre-requisite for communication flowing with enough creative friction to generate these 'buoys' is courageous vision, authenticity, trust, willingness to doubt our certainties. That doesn't mean we're going to hold a referendum on our overall vision or strategic direction. But it does mean we're going to listen for how to bring them to life by being attentive to the tides, currents, energies in our workplace. In Socratic terms, we're then able to 'midwife' and deliver potential ideas in service of what we ultimately what to achieve.

So we'll be guided by what we experience as being generated between and within our teams of talent. This brings us to the other tradition that has fertilised appreciative inquiry: positive psychology and talent development.

Positive psychology is based on the realisation that psychology has too long dwelt in the swamps of the dysfunctional. What 'doesn't work', human breakdown. Positive psychology looks into how to create peak experiences, achievement and purpose. And this it does by studying strengths, not just weaknesses, and success, more so than failure.

Research into talent development demonstrates that we all tend to have a 'talent profile', a 'unique ability' (as Strategic Coach Dan Sullivan calls it). We can usually stimulate our strengths to move towards true excellence. Rarely can we do more with our weaknesses than just to shore them up or move them from 'appalling' to average.

Hence, it is far more fruitful in a world requiring prioritisation and focus, to concentrate on strengths first and foremost. To take what IS present in a person and help that fulfill its potential. Then, working with weaknesses as a part of that effort is far less wearying and dispiriting.

Many times when we coach people we are asked to help them improve in an area. I am often asked, 'Given the above, can there really be any growth?' Oh, yes. But let's be clear. Where coaching is appropriate is where a person HAS talent, but isn't realising it. So, someone has the ability to be a good communicator, to make better decisions, to analyse well under pressure, and there are things holding them back. We believe they have the ability, but lack the experience, the skills, the confidence, the acumen.

While it has become a badge of faith to say that 'talent will find its own way', that is poppycock. It's true that 20% of input, where there is talent, will be met with 80% of action, implementation and improvisation. It is also true, that absent talent, it will take 80% input for 20% return. But talent needs coaching and mentoring. Even Shakespeare had to learn the language before he could revolutionise it.

So we should design roles to fit talent, not vice-versa. And we should deal with weaknesses against the backdrop of helping someone fulfill their strengths. And in the same way, an organisation as a whole has to leverage its past success and design a way forward that fulfills its most impressive abilities and most pressing dreams.

This is the paradox. We must appreciate what is, as a way of energising what can be. In the bittersweet movie JUNEBUG (a US red state/blue state revelation), a character says with poignant insight: 'God loves you just the way you are. But too much to let you stay the way you are.'

And so we come back to where we began, Appreciative Inquiry. Let's unpack it with the backdrop we've provided. We transform organisations and teams by appreciating them. In what way? By inviting the expression of strengths, by appreciatively challenging so that we create spaces for new inspiration, by collaborating together with faith, by co-creating a future that is almost implicit in our vision AND interaction. In the marvelous play, RENT (another Pulitzer prize winner as well as winner of numerous Broadway Tony awards), at the end of the first act, one of the central characters says: 'The opposite of war isn't peace, it's creation.'

And we transform through inquiry, through questions, by framing possibilities. When asking 'how' (not 'if') sacred texts could be available in mass quantities, Gutenberg's eye fell on the wine press as an inspiration for the printing press. The act of asking a truly provocative, transformational, paradigm-extending question, partially at least, creates the change. The moment we can ask a question 'beyond' the limits -- how to make computing user friendly, how to allow music to be heard privately, how to provide a 24 hour real-time news service, how to make cosmetics eco-friendly, how to make an airline 'cool' or profitable, how to help people 'want' to serve -- we have already shifted reality to some extent. The reason is that we have shifted our own inner reality, which is the lense through which outer reality is also transformed. This is true as long as the question is asked deeply, emotionally, with integrity, with courage, and with a true spirit of exploration and wonder.

Therefore, approaches like appreciative inquiry tell us that in order to create leadership-based change, we have to leverage our strengths, create a community of talent, and use questions (rather than premature answers) as our way forward. Honour questions always. Help people ask better ones and to live the answers. As someone said, 'I am less worried about unanswered questions rather than unquestioned answers.'

Leaders appreciatively invite everyone to live with the questions long enough so that the answers are worth waiting for and even worth inventing.

SUMMER MUSINGS:

I mentioned above that we relished the play DOUBT. After an hour and a half of watching this marvelous philosophical, religious and ethical 'feast', we emerged after the Sunday matinee and overheard a family. The father asked his daughter (about the priest's alleged wrongdoing): 'So, do you think he did it?'

His daughter answered without missing a beat, with a smugness that broadcasts an immunity to the very thing the title of the play was actually advocating: 'Of course he did, it's obvious.'

After an hour and a half of being treated to this emotionally charged exploration of certainty, doubt, mystery and openness, she emerged with...a certainty. He was a man, he was a priest, we have only to read the headlines...

What judgment had she imported to this? I told this to my wife. Her reaction was: 'She thought he did it? Really?'

Can we remember to leave the door open a bit, to let a bit of healthy doubt in towards our own certitudes? Such openness usually carries some compassion in its back pocket. That is welcome ventilation for eventual wisdom.

In a very different vein, my wife and I were dining at one of New York's finest restaurants, Jean Georges. I've been a fan of his from his time at the Oriental Bangkok, through to his superlative bravura at Lafayette at the Drake Hotel, to now.

We saw a young couple come in late in the evening. As I watched them look tentatively at the wine list, they looked adorably maladroit. My wife rightly berated me for noticing only their endearing clumsiness at the setting, the formality, and the rituals of fine dining. As per Appreciative Inquiry, she reminded me, I should be celebrating that they thought enough of themselves and a splendid chef and setting to be here at all. 'Let's build on that,' she suggested.

Of course she was right. I remember fumbling far worse in all kinds of situations. But I couldn't help thinking that their clumsiness attracted me to them, rather than repelled me in any way. I just wished I had the time (we were just leaving, and I had an incoming call from overseas I had committed to) to just congratulate them on being there, help them select a reasonable but enchanting wine, and perhaps just help them 'relax'.

As all this may have come across more as condescending than caring, it's probably just as well I didn't. They doubtless did just fine without my intrusion.

That said, how often do youngsters NOT try things, because they haven't been properly prepared? These kids had the money and the courage. But even without much money, a lit candle, a tuna casserole, a fruit salad, can be the stuff of dreams too. It just takes imagination and energy. These youngsters were making of their time together, something special. They did it at Jean Georges, I've seen others do it with a hot dog in the park, or a smoothie in the moonlight.

Too often I hear adults say, 'Kids these days.' Leslie and I have had the privilege to mentor and love numerous youngsters who initially seemed as nonchalant and remote as any. With some love and encouragement, with a bit of fun and joshing, they've all rallied to enjoy art, theater, books, ideas, foreign climes, discourse, fine dining, all these apparently 'fuddy duddy' delights.

As we seek to titillate youngsters that we care about, we have to lay a table (metaphorically) and welcome them as inviting hosts. We can't seem like tax auditors or Moses with the Tablets.

Our lament is rather 'Adults these days,' not kids. We're the ones who want to relegate kids to electronic baby sitters (video games, Ipods, et al) and then wonder that they don't automatically discover (in addition if not instead) either gentler or more growth-fostering pleasures.

Time to own our 'stuff' folks. Nurture them through their awkwardness when they try something new. Encourage their interest when it's expressed, even fleetingly. Be right there, playfully not 'parentally', to share a variety of pleasures. And don't buy the pseudo-community, 'cool' BS, when their anxiety has them broadcast it. Love them beyond that.

In the same vein as we discussed before, love them as they are, but also too much to let them stay only as they are.

Ask for the same yourself. That's the essence of personal leadership.

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