You know when you’re having a conversation with someone you admire, and pretty much every other sentence they say blows your mind?
Last fall I had the joy of getting to sit down with one of those people in my life, Heather Martinez, and something she casually dropped has been bouncing around inside me for months as I figure out how to chew on it and what it means for my graphic facilitation practice.
We were talking about process design for facilitating meaningful conversations, and I was gushing about Design Thinking and how complementary visual thinking is to that process.
Then Heather says something to the effect of “Yeah, but you can’t prototype humanity or emotions. That’s why I love Appreciative Inquiry!”
That brought me up short. I’ve dabbled with Appreciative Inquiry (or AI– not artificial intelligence AI), but with that statement, I immediately felt like it was a tool I needed to learn more about.
And this past week, the amazing and talented Christine Whitney-Sanchez facilitated over 700 IT professionals from across Arizona State University using Appreciative Inquiry and Open Space to build community, understand what’s most important to these people, and where to prioritize resources for the next year.
I think Appreciative Inquiry is a rad tool because it focuses on positivity, storytelling, human connection, discovery, and designing a path toward action. Unlike a lot of process design, it doesn’t assume to know the answers.
Here are the 5 D’s of Appreciative Inquiry, and you can learn more at this link.
Interested in applying Appreciative Inquiry to a question in your organization?
Once again, thank you from my heart and soul for your support, great senses of humor, brilliant minds, collaboration and what you're each doing to make the world a better place.
Cheers,
Where in the World is ConverSketch?
Provincetown, Massachusetts: Graphic recording for the second annual Broto Conference on Art and Climate Change where artists of all mediums and walks discussed how art could be used to scale climate action globally for good.
Photo: Michael & Suz Karchmer
Las Vegas, Nevada: With a group of engineers discussing the future of tech, trends, and big questions they’re thinking about. I can’t share much, but here’s one small illustration from my digital graphic recordings:
Tempe, Arizona: Back with the amazing Arizona State University Technology Office (UTO) who convened IT professionals from across the University to have conversations about what matters most to them and how the UTO can support a more cohesive IT network across the entire campus. This image was created from responses from an app in real-time during 21 simultaneous sessions!
Denver, Colorado: Supporting the work of Future Earth and H3Uni as they guided an esteemed group of individuals discussing the future of sustainability scholarship and how to address systems-level challenges to doing effective transdisciplinary sustainability research.
Yeah, it was a busy eight days!