Practical example
Team and organizational development
The Appreciative Inquiry process for consolidating resources and activating potentials
Requirements of the client:
Structural reorganisation, cultural change, entrepreneurial reorientation... it won’t work without willingness to change and innovation today. These are the challenges facing a multinational group that has grown strongly over the past six years, opening up new markets, developing innovative business models and recruiting additional employees. Strong in competition and fit for the future - this can only be achieved by joining forces. The members of the Management Board and Senior Management wanted to actively involve their teams in the shaping of corporate goals and were therefore looking for suitable methods and ways to achieve them.
Our approach:
Appreciative Inquiry (AI). With this value-oriented approach originating in team and organizational development, it is intended to uncover the hidden resources of a system whilst activating undreamt-of potential and motivating people to change.
Once a year, the company’s management specifies a central strategic question, which is dealt within a three-day AI retreat session across hierarchies and divisions.
The important thing is that the whole event is held outside the company and detached from the daily routine and the usual business processes. An interdisciplinary team meets in a natural environment and works analogously. After three days, the management team joins in to "pick up" what has been created.
Appreciative Inquiry has been created as a cycle consisting of five phases. After the preparatory phase, in which the core topic was defined, the participants enter the discovery phase, where they reflect on successful and uplifting aspects of their team and company during appreciative interviews. Anyone who remembers what has been proven successful before also knows where he or she can build on to create a desired vision of the future.
After the participants having gone through the Dream and Design phase, in which the visions of the future were translated into working missions, the last phase - Destiny – is dedicated to the planning of their concrete implementation. The process from "what was already good"to "how it could be"and "how it should be"to "how it will be"forms the basis for shared energy and positive change. At the end of the AI days they have elaborated a plan for new developments, but above all, there is awareness of what has already been achieved and how many opportunities there are in untapped potentials.
The result:
It is the released vitality and willingness to change which, from Nicole Schlegel’s point of view, is a wonderful breeding ground for future-oriented further developments and that makes the application of Appreciative Inquiry always worthwhile. In addition, the company appreciates the cultural added value provided by interdisciplinarity. Beyond that, personal interaction in a "natural" environment forms a stabilizing counterweight to the digitization and automation issues and thus creates a necessary balance between the poles of the future.
In the company of this practical example, AI is already entering its fourth round and it will certainly not be the last. The company has learned how to discover and develop "the best" within the organization.