ATTITUDES

Our focus,
our reality

Appreciative Inquiry 2

What this changed focus gives you, apart from that permanent smile on your face, is the power to create something magical and powerful

Naresh Karmalker

First of all, how did you find last month's exercise? Did you notice something different? Did you start feeling a teeny-weeny bit better about yourself, your family, your friends, your city? Hey, even the same strict battleaxe teacher could have appeared not so menacing. So what has changed? Has the outside world changed or have you changed? The fact is that neither has changed - you have only started focusing on the positive, the vibrant, the life-giving aspects about yourself and the things around you. And what this changed focus gives you, apart from that permanent smile on your face, is the power to create something magical and powerful.

Let me give you an example. Some years ago, British Airways (BA), England's national airline, had to deal with increasing cases of lost baggage on arrival. The problem was getting rather severe with both the reputation and business taking a beating.

We can choose to look at that strict teacher
as an ogre and a tyrant or we can tend to look
at her as someone who is willing to be tough
with you so that you will learn and achieve
something in life

How did BA deal with this pressing problem? The issue was 'lost luggage' and a few steps to ensure its safety would have sufficed. But what they did was slightly different. Taking a cue from AI, they asked themselves, "How can we ensure the best possible arrival experience for all our passengers?" What was different, you may ask. Tons! In the first case, they would have been looking at what was not working and devised various ways to plug the leaks. Some of these steps would have worked, some perhaps not. Then newer steps would have been needed to set right what was not working in the solution and so on and so forth. And this would be accompanied by tons of stress, negativity, fear and irritability.

When BA decided to focus on providing the best possible arrival experience for its passengers, what did they do? They focused on the future - a positive one at that. They looked back at all the times they had had a passenger thank them for good service and identified what gave a passenger pleasure. And they said to themselves, "Hey can we learn from what we have done well in the past and do more of that - bigger and better?" And so they rolled out their action plan to ensure that every passenger went home a happy person. And what about luggage - well, luggage delivered on time to the arriving passenger was an intrinsic part of this large happy 'dream'. So, without focusing on lost luggage per se, they had solved the 'problem' of lost luggage by dwelling on a large positive image of the future! Same issue - different approaches! And what a difference in the result! And did they have problems? Of course they did but now they looked at them in the context of the larger positive picture they were trying to create and found innovative ways to tackle them. All in all, a happy staff and happy passengers meant a wonderful experience for all.

How we define a situation dictates our response to it. We can choose to look at that strict teacher as an ogre and a tyrant or we can tend to look at her as someone who is willing to be tough with you, against her innermost feelings, so that you will learn and achieve something in life. We can look at our cities and towns and complain about the lack of cleanliness and civic sense or we can appreciate how much progress we have made in this regard, uphold the individuals who are role models and seek to multiply the positive.

As Dr Malcolm 'Mac' Odell, the energetic and die-hard AI practitioner puts it: "If you look for problems, you fill find (and create) more problems. If you look for success, you find (and create) more success."

The Appreciative Monthly Exercise

• Look at your own life. Choose at least two aspects of your life you are not happy about - that are 'not working'. Write this down as a statement.
• Let's look at this example: "I am always late for everything."
• Look back at your life and find as many instances as you can when you have been on time. So was your statement really true? We often tend to generalize and more so about the negative.
• Now change the statement to "I am often on time when I put my mind to it."
• Create the inquiry on "How can I always be on time, no matter what?" Look at all those instances you have identified and dig deeper to find out what you did that made you be on time. Write down these 'root causes of success' on a separate sheet of paper.
• For the next month, try and duplicate these steps whenever you need to be somewhere at a particular time. Don't give up.
• Do this for as many aspects of your life you want to move ahead in.

Naresh Karmalker is an NGO consultant and citizen activist with a keen interest in training and capacity building. He has been working with Appreciative Inquiry for over 10 years having used it in several countries in varied situations.