1 Planning re-imagined
Action planning for a project tends to follow a structured and often linear path. Whilst there are occasions on which this can work well, you may have already reflected that appreciative inquiry might require different approaches to thinking and planning for new possibilities. In the next activity you will consider this idea further.
Activity 1 Action planning 101
Do a web search for ‘action planning templates’ and spend some time browsing the examples you find.
- What do you notice about the way these are formatted?
- What kinds of information do these templates expect to be captured in an action plan?
Comment
It is likely that the templates you have discovered are largely formatted as tables for completion. Key information includes things like core objectives, specific tasks, success criteria, resources and timeframes. The implication here is that there will be a solution that ‘fits’ the issue, rather than allowing for the development of unanticipated outcomes.
You may also have identified that the templates focused on individual rather than collective leadership. Clearly, all of these elements have an important role to play in delivering tangible change, but the linear, tabulated format of the plan as a whole sits less comfortably with the more improvised and generative approach at the heart of appreciative inquiry.
One way to ensure that the process of designing for change in your inquiry maintains the momentum of the appreciative inquiry process is to pause for a moment and recall some of the key characteristics of the approach, considering how they might influence the phase that we have called ‘Innovating and designing’. For example, you have explored the ways in which an appreciative inquiry can be a site of co-construction where new possibilities and futures are collectively imagined. You have also seen the value of story in imagining possible new practices and you have used a range of techniques to generate the kinds of creative and critical thinking that enables different ways of thinking to emerge for further exploration and action (Ghaye et al., 2008). In the rest of this session, you will approach the task of innovation and design by drawing on these same characteristics.
Part of the challenge is to bring together the stories, images, metaphors and more that have been generated in the ‘Immersing and appreciating’ (Session 2) and ‘Imagining and dreaming’ (Session 3) phases of your inquiry in ways that can begin to generate the kinds of commitments and actions that will create new practices. To do this, argue Watkins, Mohr and Keely (2011), we need to overcome our ‘limited ability to realise that what we see in parts is always some small piece of a larger whole, and that it is our choice about whether to see the part or to embrace the whole’ (p. 75). It is this holistic approach which forms the basis of the next section which returns to consider the stories we are working with.