4.1 An appreciative mindset
We are often conditioned to identify the problems, the things that aren’t going as well as we had hoped and the areas that we feel we need to pay more attention to. It can be challenging to articulate what is going well, where our successes are, and when we feel confident and content. This is often a conversation that is skimmed over in favour of concentrating our discussions on addressing the trickiest or emotionally difficult aspects of our practice. But, an appreciative approach to inquiry directly challenges this. It asks us to consider moments of positivity, practices that are having the greatest impact or those things about our work that make us feel most inspired, happy and energised.
An appreciative approach proposes that it is exactly these aspects we ought to be paying attention to as a possible driver for inquiry into future practices. As Bushe (2007) states, an appreciative mindset is to ‘recognise … what exists already and use this … to get more’ (p. 6), where we are able to identify possibilities that emerge from people and processes that are working well. We may already know where exciting, interesting and new practices are developing, but often we don’t think that these could or should be the focus of inquiry.
Activity 5 Appreciating practices
Make a note of the following examples:
- The last time you had a conversation with a colleague or peer about something really exciting, interesting, or energising that happened in your practice. What was it and why did you discuss it?
- An element of your practice that you feel proud of.
- An idea, resource or practice that you haven’t had the opportunity to try out, but that excites you. Why does it excite you?
- Something that you feel has made a significant, positive difference to your practice in the last two years. What is it and why has it been a positive change? How did it come about?
Reflect on your answers to these questions. How easy or challenging did you find answering the questions? Why do you think this may be?
Comment
Shifting from a culture where we are less likely to explicitly discuss successes, achievements and positive change, to one where we openly discuss these aspects of practice can make us feel a little self-conscious. It can sometimes feel boastful or unnecessary when there are problems to solve, but as this course will explore, these positive spaces are the very places where you can generate and develop practices that can make a significant difference in your contexts.
This activity has focused your attention on you as an individual. But, developing a collective appreciative mindset is an important consideration when working with others in inquiry. When we bring together a group of people, each will have a slightly different narrative based on a collective oral tradition as to what happens, why it happens that way and what experiences are collectively valued as positive. These stories are an important part of an appreciative approach to inquiry and will be explored in more detail in Session 2.
The next section will look at what it means to develop an appreciative gaze.