Facilitating Appreciative Inquiry - Mapping user feedback to business goal

A part of my responsibility as a Business Principal also involves facilitating conversations on end user feedback and how it maps to business goals.

There are several tools to map end user feedback to business goals. However, the intent is to understand how users perceive a business goal. 

We designed a more engaging exercise that can lead to more detailed inquiry on how the business goal impacts the end users. This post is a quick experience report on facilitating an exercise Appreciative Inquiry that helped us in this intent.

Some Context

Our operations team has been rolling out several initiatives to help with building capability in an office. Of several initiatives, one of the most critical is that of goal setting and individual self reviews.

The initiatives around capability are critical since we are a consulting company that prides on working on cutting edge techniques that help our clients with their business challenges and business journey in the future.

After 2 years of having launched a new initiative, it was time to collect feedback in a more determined manner that will help us gauge its effectiveness and work on the next set of bets and initiatives.

Choosing the right facilitation technique

The key challenge was understanding what outcomes we wanted. After an initial conversation with the business stakeholders - in this case the operations team , we decided that the conversation and inquiry was important among the users.

While there are several traditional feedback techniques or retrospective techniques, none of them look at the journey or engage the users beyond the transactional nature of these initiatives.

With the outcome defined, we decided on the Appreciative Inquiry technique for the following reasons:

• Appreciative Inquiry works on the current strengths of the process
• It helps the users build on the strengths to dream about a future state
• It also generates more questions that will help with Inquiry

The workshop 

Planning for the workshop

The workshop was planned in 2 phases to accommodate more engaging conversations.

The workshop started with context setting around what we expect the users to contribute throughout the exercise. We emphasised on the Appreciative Inquiry process.

We started with a quick check-in. 

For this purpose, we designed a light weight checkin process. Each team member was asked to come up with an adjective for how they relate to the capability initiative.

We split the participants into 3 teams

Workshop - Phase 1 - Discover

We nudged the participants to come up with one strength that they can personally relate to.

As a part of their group, we asked them to discuss these strengths and ask them to come up with one strength that the team agrees on.

This helped in the inquiry on how they can come up with a common strength of the initiative.

Workshop - Phase 2 - Dream

We then asked the participants to work with the common strength the group came up with. This time, we asked them to come up with more strengths that they would like to see in an ideal initiative.

As a part of the journey, we also realised that the participants started coming up with a lot of questions that they have had . The inquiry process helped them discuss some of these as they were coming up with a new dream initiative.

They also came up with the set of strengths and ideas that they can use for the ideal initiative.

Workshop - Phase 3 - Design

This time , before we started the next phase of the workshop, we switches the groups to work on a set of questions and ideas that another group came up with.

This forced the groups to interpret the ideas and questions that the other group came up with. There was also cross group communication that forced more inquiry as the design needs to be based on ideas that the other groups came up with.

Outcomes

The groups were pretty engaged with the list of questions, ideas and new initiative approach. 

The ask from the groups was to carry out the inquiry outside the workshop as well so that this can continue.

A common critique of the workshop was that there was not enough time to complete some of these tasks. 

The next step is to have a different forum to address some of these questions and look at some of these ideas as we go forward with this initiative.

Conclusions on the approach

This approach was very inclusive and engaging and helped us achieve the outcomes we designed it for.