Blending Appreciative Inquiry and Continuous Improvement

This is a transcription of the Business901 Podcast, Is Appreciative Inquiry the next step for Continuous Improvement?. Ankit Patel, principal partner with The Lean Way Consulting firm while doing some work with the Cleveland Clinic, discovered Appreciative Inquiry and saw an opportunity to blend it with his work in Continuous Improvement. An excerpt of the podcast can be found on this blogpost, Connecting Continuous Improvement and Appreciative Inquiry.

Related Information:
My Engagement Strategy – Appreciative Inquiry
Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative
The Difference In Lean Problem Solving for Sales and Marketing
Getting Resistance to Appreciative Inquiry?

Framing the Act of Innovation, as an Act of Empathizing

In my Continuous Improvement journey into the Sales and Marketing field, I have taken Service Design as one of the leading concepts. One of the areas that is most evident in Service Design and Design Thinking is the aspect of Empathy.  Seung Chan Lim, nicknamed SLIM has engrossed himself into a special project that I have found rather unique. The project name is Realizing Empathy and below is an excerpt from the upcoming podcast.

Slim:  What's really funny is... Basically, I would almost categorize myself as an empirical researcher. Because as much as I love books and if you come to my place you'll see so many books, I don't really read them as much as I probably should. I'm much more of an experiential person. So taking classes and acting is like another way of understanding, what does it mean to act instead of reading a book about it. I decided to just do it. Basically, what I learned in acting class is that it broke my preconceived notion of the idea that acting is pretending. To a certain degree, yes; there is a pretend in it. But by and large, what actors do is they try to bring in their own experiences and bring it into the moment when they're on stage. But they do it under a frame. They do it under the name of some other character that's inside a play.

They do it in a situation that is not their own. But what they're really doing is they're accessing their own personal experience, triggering them in the moment. So when the audience sees it, they may think it's the character doing it, but they feel that what they're doing is real because it is real. They're trying their very best to be true to themselves.

That's a very different way of thinking about acting. Because what they're doing is they're empathizing both in real time with what the character's going through, and also before, during rehearsals, they're constantly trying to understand what it is that this character, this writer has written, is really trying to do because the words don't really tell you enough.

You have to have gestures. You have to have facial expressions. All these other nuances have to be coincided with the words for it to really work as a remarkable piece of artwork that moves the audience and gets them to think about things differently. It wasn't until I took that acting class that the word empathy entered into my equation.

Website: http://realizingempathy.com/
Facebook: http://facebook.com/realizempathy/

Slim’s model talks about framing the act of making not as an act of innovation, but as an act of empathizing. The model suggests a new direction for design. It might be quite leap, or is it?

Related Information:
Side Effects of our Desires and Abilities to Empathize
Appreciative Inquiry and Organizational Change
Getting Resistance to Appreciative Inquiry?
How to Design like an Architect

Plan your Show and Tell - Mindmap on Prototyping

At some point and time, you have to turn your idea into a reality. The best way is to get feedback as early as possible even at the pen paper stage, Your First Prototype is with Pen and Paper. Most of us are bias about our idea and even in the way we perceive and interpret the data. This is why having a structured approach to prototyping is imperative. Without one, we typically see what we want to see. As a result, we gain confirmation versus additional knowledge.

You must be very open to feedback at this stage. You must welcome complaints and criticisms from others. If you take an honest and positive approach in gaining feedback from others, you will have increased your odds of success and gain the valuable information needed.

The instinctive type approach is surprisingly rather closed to alternatives. As a result the outcome is frequently flawed or less effective than a structured approach. In The Thinker’s Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving book outlines six steps of the problem with intuitive problem solving:

We commonly begin our analysis of a problem by formulating our conclusions; we thus start at what should be the end of the analytic process.

Our analysis usually focuses on the solution which we intuitively favor; we therefore give inadequate attention to alternative solutions.

The solution we intuitively favor is more often than not the first one that seems satisfactory.

We tend to confuse “discussing/thinking hard” about a problem with “analyzing” it (these2 activities are not at all the same).

We focus on the substance (evidence, arguments, and conclusions) and not on the process of our analysts.

Most people are functionally illiterate when it comes to structuring their analysis.

If you would like to download the PDF, Prototype.

If people have not learned and understood problem solving techniques, they cannot formulate a reasonable conclusion. It is a guess and a reaction based simply on intuition. Building the prototype is the easy part. Breaking them, testing them and learning from them is the important part. In a recent read, Prototyping: A Practitioner's Guide, I found author Todd Warfel description of the process outstanding. Though the book may lend itself more to the UI/UX/IX and other software designers, I found the book fascinating and so grounded in foundational principles that I would recommend it for anyone. The majority of the Mindmap below is a result of my interpretation of the book.

The reporting process I recommend for most prototyping is using a basic A3 for structure. This way you outline your process in a clear and concise manner.

Related information:
Why Prototype? Customer Interactivity is the Most Meaningful Part of Design
Prototyping into a Working Form
Prototypes provide a Pathway for Connecting with Customers
A Product Marketers perspective on Prototyping