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 say “wait a minute Shannon, that goes against all of that principles.” So even I have to keep applying the principles. I also think what I’ve discovered is that I used to think that I had to do the heavy lifting in facilitating something like this. I had to do all the work, I had to do all the prep and what you realize with this process is that there is the collective wisdom of the people in the room and if you are open to accepting and working with what people in the room have to say the process really, in some ways leads itself, the real work is leading up to and designing the guide, what questions are you going to ask, that takes a lot work, but once you are in the day it really starts to sing and I stopped worrying about being the expert in the room and suddenly everyone in the room was the expert and then the process went much better.

Kathryn: How interesting. So let me ask you a different aspect of that question. How has being involved in AI affected the way you live your life and out of that what could our listeners take away from this whole process and the principles that are involved in AI, what could they take away that would help them increase the tonnage of happiness in the world.

Shannon: Well one of the things I’ve taken away is I usually end an AI with the question, “What’s the smallest change you can make that would have the biggest impact?” And I think since its still January and people may have New Year’s resolutions on their mind I think that’s a great way to think about any goals that you’re setting, maybe even if it’s your goals for the day or could be your goals for the year is what’s the smallest thing you could do would have the biggest impact? Because we tend to think to implement whole system change and it takes so much work and our lives are so busy and for me I’ve revamped my New Year’s resolutions and instead of having a list of 20 things that I want to do, I have those 20 things, but I focus what are the top three things. The three things that can have the biggest impact and one of them is sleep. I realized that would have the biggest impact. Half an hour would have the biggest impact. The other thing is done is I have two children and my three-year-old at night instead of just having a story and going to bed or singing a song, I try to ask her what’s the best thing about your day, what was the best thing that happened? To orient her to what’s working and she doesn’t have the concept of time yet, so she’ll remember something from Christmas or New Years, but it gets her thinking about what was working during the day and hopefully will work as far as it, when she comes up with challenges at school, people who are challenging, well what are their strengths, what are they good at, how could you use your own strengths to work through the situation. So I’m trying to integrate it with my children as well.

Kathryn: Okay integrating it with your children who are small as seven years old that’s terrific. So are there any other ideas most of us are not going to be going to AI summits, but we go through our lives, we interact with our families, we interact with our team-workers, what are some of the small ways that some of these principles could show up in daily life.

Shannon: Well if you’re at work, one thing I also say is usually people have a lot of meetings whether it’s two persons meeting or group meetings and one thing I like to do is start and end the meeting with something that’s working. So opening with a question of “what was working this week, what went well this week”, to orient people towards things that are already going well as opposed to start, “alright what happened, what do we have to fix,” which tends to be the case. And the same thing with family members because I find that family members we tend to get into this rut of “well this person died, and Aunt Mary you know, she just had surgery,” so trying to have family interactions start off with how can you give positive feedback even, sort of like positive gossip, how do you start that, how do you have a holiday where you’re focusing on the strengths? I’ve had my family taken the strengths survey, try to do a strengths tree, so trying to integrate some of those little principles, positivity principle and what kinds of questions you asked. I think the principle of asking an unconditionally positive question is a great one because if you phrase it in a way that there’s no way to answer it in a negative way, if you say “how was your day”, you would be like, “well let me tell you about the…” If you ask “what was the best part of your day” then you’re forced to answer in a positive way.

Kathryn:  Ok and you have tried that out with your family small and large?

Shannon: I have.

Kathryn: And then what happened?

Shannon: It reoriented them and then my husband started to use it on me, so I would come home and say “can you believe what happened to me” and he would say “what was the best part of your day”, alright, touché’.

Kathryn: And then what happens when he asks that?

Shannon: And then what happens, when I get over the “ugh, he’s using my own principle to against me”, then I think OK what was the best part of my day and it is totally shifts my energy, shifts my mood and I spend less time ruminating on what didn’t go well.

Kathryn: Ok alright that sounds like definitely something to take home. So what’s next for you, what is your dream right now?

Shannon: Well I have some small steps and some dreams too. A small step is I’m giving a talk on Appreciative Inquiry to project managers so hopefully helping them figure out these similar things, how can they integrate this work into their lives. I love the Peter Drucker quote, who is the management guru, “The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths that makes our systems’ weaknesses irrelevant” so my goal is how can I help people create an alignment of strengths that makes their weaknesses irrelevant and my big dream is doing larger AI summits, so doing AI summits on veteran hiring since we’re in DC. It would be fantastic to do one for the entire city of DC, considering some of the challenges our city has gone through recently. It would be great to bring everybody together and figure out what are our strengths and how can we leverage those.

Kathryn: I’ve got a possibility for you, why don’t you take on Congress? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could discover and dream and come up with a way for Congress to really work for us? So there you are in DC, maybe that’s in the back of your mind. So we’re just about to the end of our time. I would like to end with a question, what’s the most important thing that you would like for listeners to take away from today’s call? You know what I just realized I forgot a question that I really wanted to ask which is, Shannon what suggestions do you have for AI practitioners so you can leave the other question, leave it on the burner, but first let us know what you’d like to say to AI practitioners.

Shannon: Well practitioners or facilitators, trainers, coaches, one thing I would say is that the times where I have seen it work the best is when you get all of the stakeholders in the room and that means everyone who was even peripherally involved within an organization. So I did one for a school and said “we’d love to do an AI, but we don’t want to have the students there.” And I thought how is that going to work, the students are an integral part of the school and they refused. So I tried to do pre-summit interviews to get their voices in the room and in the end it was successful, but it wasn’t as successful as it could’ve been if we’d had everyone in the room. So I think that’s one thing I would say and the second is push for the most amount of time that you can, some say they can give you a day, we can only give you six hours, well only five hours and then at the end they were not happy that they didn’t quite get as many results as they wanted, but they kept cutting the time. So that’s the second thing. The final thing is follow-through. It’s really about following up on all of the groups and asking the stakeholders to jump in and to engage because you can have a great day where everyone is leaves and they are happy, but if you don’t follow up on what they need to do and what they are committed to it’s part of those action items done. So those are my few suggestions.

Kathryn: So something before, something during and then something after, but definitely the something after to make sure that the delivery actually happens. Alright thank you, so now I’m back to my last question, what would you most likely listeners to take away from this discussion?

Shannon: I think my suggestion would be to ask yourself what is the smallest change you could make that would have the biggest impact, so that’s your homework. And if you are at a loss, think of one question a day that you could frame as an unconditionally positive question. So either a question to ask yourself or a question to ask someone else in your life and just notice what the response is. So just one question a day that’s my take away. I think once you see the impact of that one question it will spur you on to do it more and more.

Kathryn: Thank you so much Shannon and thank you for bringing us all these ideas for World Happiness Day.

Shannon: Thanks so much.

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 “you what is a high point moments you have involved in this organization? So what’s a high point moment living in Cincinnati in one of those cities?” Then a continuity question, “what’s something you want to keep?” So this city is going to change, what’s one thing special you want to keep? And then usually it’s a vision of the future question of “if anything was possible, what would you want to create?” And you have people talking and because they’re engaging with each other they are energized, they are enlivened, they are already feeling valued, they are discovering the strengths of each other and you’re also required to report back to the table for the person you’re interviewing, so you have a job to do.

Kathryn: So you’re listening?

Shannon: Right, so then the table discusses what are the commonalities, what are the root causes success and they flipchart and someone is leading, someone is keeping time, someone is going to report out and you have the whole table talking. So you go from 2, to a table of eight, to each table, if there’s time, reporting back to the whole. And you realize when the whole room reports back that there is lots of variety in strengths and high-point moments and then there’s a lot of diversity as well and it really energizes the whole room and it’s a process that builds, so that’s the first part of how it works.

Kathryn: That’s the discovery step. Okay great.

Shannon: And then you get into a playful mode of dreaming of the future, so based on what these strengths are, Cincinnati has 52 neighborhoods and that’s one of their strengths, their strong character of their neighborhoods. And then it’s what is your vision of the future but not just let’s write it down, let’s flip chart it out, it’s let’s create a play, let’s do something performative. So people would get to tap their creativity and you can think “really? this is frightening”,  what are people actually going to do when you sit them down at a table, there’s balloons, silly putty, there’s flexible straws and what’s fascinating is that people really get into it, they get excited to get to play and so much positive emotions generated and then they get to perform it in front of a room and they get raucous applause. And their voices are heard and it’s much more memorable when you see someone singing opera about how Cincinnati has come together and united, so it’s is a really playful way to get out your vision of the future.

Kathryn: So I’m just going to risk a little question here, do you remember anything at all from the performance that you were involved in?

Shannon: I remember taking on an Irish accent and we wanted to convey a strength-based city and one of those strengths was the diversity of the city and so I was the Irish character, I am not sure where that came from.

Kathryn:  Okay alright, I can imagine you doing that. So that’s the dreaming part.

Shannon: Right. Then you get into the second two parts of it, and that’s design and delivery and I love the way that David explains this because he talks about this he calls the first two Ds the ecstasy and then next two are the laundry, ecstasy and the laundry.

Kathryn: Right, right after the ecstasy then the laundry I think that’s a book by John Kornfeld. That’s a great takeoff on that. Great so tell us about the first bit of the laundry.

Shannon:  The design is, he talks about rapid prototyping so organizations like Ideo that have created so many new products they instead of having a long process, they say, “let’s do it really quickly, let’s create a prototype of something physical and what would it look like”. And at this point you’re voting with your feet and you are voting on a topic area you are really interested in and people are getting to choose where they want to go. And each group, each topic group, gets to vote on within that what’s the one top idea, they brainstorm what ideas they can create first as far as what their vision is and then they pick one, and then they try to design a prototype that they are going to report out to the room about. So it’s another way of getting your voice in the room and actually creating something in the space.

Kathryn: So do you remember any of the designs, any of the rapid prototypes that came out of Cincinnati or Cleveland?

Shannon: I remember the Strengths Based City Initiative because the VIA survey that I mentioned before they’re actually housed in Cincinnati, they’re from Cincinnati Institute. The Strengths Based Cities Initiative created a whole vision, a map of the 52 neighborhoods in Cincinnati and created street signs like Strengths Way, all sorts of different ideas of how they could apply the strengths so they used some of the tools from the table in the dream portion to create that visual and it was a much more powerful way to convey something when they got up and reported back to the room than if they were just talking as a recorder.

Kathryn: Right okay so now we’ve gotten through the design part, how about the delivery part, the last, putting the laundry on the lines to dry.

Shannon: Exactly. Well that’s the challenging part, that’s where the rubber meets the road. This is where the practical people in the room really take off, they like the fact that you’re writing down who are the names of everybody in the group, what’s their email addresses, who’s going to take on which initiative,  what are you going to do in the next one month, three months, six months, one year in order to make these things happen. And what’s fascinating is that when I run an AI summit usually people think that someone else is going to do the work. The last moment of a two-day summit and everyone said well the board of this organizations, I am sure the board is going to do it, and I said “no, that’s the point of AI’s, you are going to take it on, you are part of this process and you have ownership.” So people do have ownership and you find the people who are really willing to engage and because the process has been engaging from the beginning, you have people who really step up and who say, “you know what, I’m going to organize a mini summit and we’re going to do it three months from now and I’m going to find a space, I will get some food donated” and it becomes really engaging process because people really step up to the plate and make things happen.

Kathryn:  Let me ask you, that’s the 4Ds now let’s just do a quick review. So there was dream, oh sorry, I skipped Discover, how terrible that would be, so there’s Discover where people learn about themselves and think about their strengths, there’s Dream where they lift the top off and just come up with anything, there is Design which is where they start prototyping and then Deliver which is where things start to happen. Ok alright what a great way of remembering and I can remember the 4Ds. 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.

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 Appreciative Inquiry, those are very powerful words, what do they mean when you put them together?

Appreciative Inquiry

Shannon: That’s a very good question; appreciative is usually we think of it as looking at something that’s good and that we would like to look at, something we appreciate. Appreciative also means to appreciate, to raise in the value so when we look at what is working, what’s good, we also elevated, we raise it in value and inquiry means to ask questions. So together it is how are you constructing unconditionally positive questions and what does that lead you to discover. So it’s a process, it’s a change management process discovered by or created a theory founded by David Cooperrider from Case Western Reserve in the early 1980s and he was working with organizations and you know the traditional way of working with organization is to do a SWAT analysis. You know it’s a very defined way of what’s the problem, what’s the root cause analysis, let’s brainstorm some solutions and you know develop a treatment plan. And he really flipped that on its head and said you know if you keep looking what the problems are in the organization, you become an expert in the problems. What if we looked at what’s working in an organization, what strengths does an organization have and how can we leverage those strengths to create a vision of the future because there’s some principles that AI follows that show that we really, we really follow what vision of the future we create and one of those is that we live in a world that our questions create. So every action is preceded by a question. So if you are questioning your life is you know “what’s wrong with me?”, well you are going to find things that are wrong with you. If the question is “what’s right with me? What’s working?”, that’s what you’re going find and that’s what you can leverage.

Another principle of AI is that is the poetic principle that what we focus on grows so wherever you put your attention that’s what’s going to grow. So that’s why Appreciative Inquiry wants to focus on what’s working. And the third is this the Simultaneity Principle, so change begins the moment you ask the question. So the moment you ask the question “what’s wrong with me?” usually our energy drops and we get very serious and you know our vision contracts, but if the first question is “what’s working in this organization I would leverage it?”, change begins the moment you ask that question too.

The fourth principle is the Anticipatory Principle and that is it positive images actually pulls us forward, it’s like heliotropic effect in plants, plants grow towards the light and we’re similar. We like to grow towards what’s with possible, what inspires us. And the final principle is the Positive Principle, that positive emotions lead us to positive actions.  There is a lot of research from Barbara Fredrickson, out of UNC Chapel Hill that the Broadmanville Theory that when you engender positive emotions, it leads people to see more, people are more creative, they are more collaborative, they are less racially biased, it leads to better health, all sort of things.

So Appreciative Inquiry takes all of these processes and in psychology which tends to look at just the individual person because that’s easier to test, AI looks at an organization as a whole and how you can leverage that, so I think that is one of the major distinctions is that it just doesn’t focus on an individual, it focuses on an organization or people as a whole.

Kathryn: Wow, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it explained quite so clearly, so thank you Shannon. Alright so how did you get started with appreciative inquiry?

Shannon: Well I was a student of David Cooperrider’s in the MAPP program of University of Pennsylvania and…

Kathryn: And what does MAPP stand for?

Shannon:  MAPP stands for the Master of Applied Positive Psychology, so it’s a terminal master degree at the University of Pennsylvania. There is only one master program of its kind in the United States and that was founded by Dr. Martin Seligman and Dr. Cooperrider was a guest lecturer and probably one of the most inspiring lecturers we had and he started taking us through what’s known as the “Four D” process. So it’s discovering the strength of an organization, dreaming of the future, designing the future, so based on what you want to create and what you want to have happen and then delivering what the future is. He took us through the process, he just didn’t lecture, he gave us an experiential view of it. And I think from that moment everyone in the room wanted to try it out themselves.

Kathryn: So can you tell us about a time when you tried it out, what happened and what was it like?

Shannon: Sure, well I did a sort of a smaller version of summit, sort of two of the four D’s with Westin Hotels, and my co-facilitator Jeremy McCarthy and I coupled it with the VIA strengths survey is a character strength survey that you can find on Viame.org, and so what we did is because AI focuses on strengths, we decided to give people a little grounding in that, just to help reorient them from the negativity bias and to help them get the specific strength to talk about. So we had them take the survey, we started off the day with a little mini-lecture about strengths and this specific survey and then we launched into the discover portion of it. We had people interview each other and what’s interesting is that I wasn’t quite sure what we would get out of it, we had a limited period amount of time and the manager of the hotel said “you know we just wanted to have, you know what we would really love you know the numbers that customers wants number to go up” and I thought I’m not sure that just doing discover and dream is really going to help you there but you know we’ll try.

Kathryn: Might as well.

Shannon: And what was fascinating is that all throughout the day, he was so amazed that people who were temporary workers were standing up and speaking or taking the microphone, were engaging and at the end of the day one of the most powerful piece of feedback was someone wrote “I didn’t know how much longer I would be working here but I’m so inspired by this vision of Westin’s future, that I’m going to stay”. And that was a really powerful moment because it made me realize that when you really engage all the stakeholders and you make everyone’s voices important, it’s amazing what you can accomplish.

Kathryn: So that was a small group, I’ve heard that AI can be used with small groups, you know maybe family size groups and big groups like you know entire organizations at once. What do you know; I mean what can you tell us about how AI works with different size groups?

Shannon: Well I have been involved with small and medium size group, I have also been a part of summits for the entire city of Cleveland and the entire city Cincinnati so for those summit they were between 5 and 800 people in one room for about three days. And you would think that it would be complete chaos just trying to have people self-organize those groups and what’s interesting is that the process is so well structured and loose at various times that it allows for that flexibility and actually having more people means that you get more ideas and more creativity in the room. So I’ve actually seen a whole city summit of Cincinnati engage people more than a group of say 20 and didn’t have all the stakeholders involved because it was too insular.

So I would say that organizations tend to be scared to have too many people. I think we need to have just the right number of people. I would say have all the stakeholders if you can in a room because that’s where you going to get the most creativity, the most generative ideas and collaboration.