Category Archives: Appreciative Inquiry

How to Get Set for an Appreciative Inquiry Summit

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The benefits of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) glitter gold (see our previous blog post), but what do you need to assure success? While there is more than one way to host a productive AI summit, seasoned AI expert and summit facilitator Shannon Polly says that there are steps that you (or whoever would plan your AI summit) can take to prep for best outcomes: • Know your organization – Is the organizational culture very top-down? Do you have buy-in from key leaders? Strive to get leaders on-board and solicit at least one of these people to lend their credibility to AI. This might look like a testimonial or keynote address at the beginning of the summit, and will certainly involve their participation in the four phases. If your organization doesn’t believe that focusing on strengths is the best way of approaching… …

entheos Interview: What Appreciative Inquiry Has Taught Me

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An Interview with Shannon Polly, MAPP and Kathryn Britton, editor of Positive Psychology News Daily en*theos International Day of Happiness Virtual Conference Kathryn: Getting back to the personal of this, what’s the most interesting thing that you learned about yourself in the course of doing AI summits? Shannon: Oh that’s a great question. A number of things, I think one of the things I learned is that even though I’ve had all of this training in positive psychology I still too have a negativity bias and I have not been cured of that. I was doing an AI summit leading into strategic plan for an organization recently and the AI summit was great because the positivity principle is built in and really started to design the strategic plan and I started to slip into “well the lease is up in 2017 and what if we lose it” and then I had to jolt myself out of it and… …

entheos Interview: The “Four D” Process of Appreciative Inquiry

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An Interview with Shannon Polly, MAPP and Kathryn Britton, editor of Positive Psychology News Daily. en*theos International Day of Happiness Virtual Conference Kathryn: Tell us a little bit more about the process; you said the process is very organized so that makes it kind of keep things on track. So maybe you could lead us through what happened with the Cincinnati Summit. Shannon: Sure. So first you know there is a maybe 25 minutes of what is this principle, what’s the process of Appreciate Inquiry, what are we taking people through just to orient them, you don’t want to have more than about 30 minutes of it because then peoples energy tends to wane. What you want to do is immediately get them into one-on-one interviews. So you have people in tables of eight usually and you have them find a partner and you asked them they have a program guide in front of them and generally they are asking… …

entheos Interview: Introduction to Appreciative Inquiry

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An Interview with Shannon Polly, MAPP and Kathryn Britton, editor of Positive Psychology News Daily en*theos International Day of Happiness Virtual Conference Kathryn: Good morning Shannon, thank you for joining me here we are in celebration of world happiness day. Before we jump into your topic, Appreciative Inquiry, could you tell us a bit about yourself? Martin Seligman with Shannon Polly Shannon: Sure, thanks for having me Catherine. I am a positive psychology practitioner, I’m a coach, a facilitator, trainer, speaker and I live in Washington DC. I have my own consulting company call Shannon Polly and Associates and I also found an organization called Positive Business DC and our mission is to increase the tonnage of happiness starting in the nation’s Capitol, but not limited to the nation’s Capitol, so my passion is around helping individuals and organizations learn how to flourish by using training and positive psychology practices. Kathryn: Alright thank you, so tell us a little bit about… …

Can Appreciative Inquiry Transform Cincinnati into a Strengths-Based City?

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I didn’t think much about going to Cincinnati, to be honest with you.  I went because David Cooperrider (the creator of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) and a Zen-like figure in Organizational Development) is a vanguard in the organizational development world.  I went because I wanted to see Appreciative Inquiry on a large scale.  I did not go because I wanted to be moved to tears (or singing, as the case may be).  But Cincinnati moved me.  The AI process moved me…and I’ve been through it before. For those of you dictionary lovers here is a recap of what the name means: Appreciate: Recognize the quality, significance or magnitude of; To be fully aware of or sensitive to; To raise in value or price Inquiry: The process of gathering information for the purpose of learning and changing; A close examination in a quest for truth I’ve written… …