Episode 20 | How to Have a Tough Conversation February 20, 2022
GUESTS: Jackie Stavros and Cheri Torres, Authors, Conversations Worth Having: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Fuel Productive and Meaningful Engagement
Our words are what often help us to frame whether we see the world as a set of problems or opportunities. Communications experts Jackie Stavros and Cheri Torres believe that anyone can create meaningful and productive conversations that can be catalysts for change. it comes down to asking the right questions and approaching challenging conversations with creativity. Longtime friends and colleagues, they are co-authors of Conversations Worth Having: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Fuel Productive and Meaningful Engagement. For decades, Jackie and Cheri have counseled individuals, companies, institutions, and other organizations on how to use two simple practices to make every conversation count. In this episode, Jackie and Cheri offer the tools and techniques you need to have conversations worth having. (Appreciative Inquiry is an approach developed by David Cooperrider. AI fosters positive change in organizations and communities.)
GUEST BIOS:
Jackie Stavros has more than 30 years of leadership, strategy, organization development and change management experience, and is the creator of SOAR – a strategy to help organizations create meaningful conversations about opportunities and positive change. She is a professor at Michigan’s Lawrence Technological University College of Business and IT and a senior specialist in Appreciative Inquiry. Jackie earned her doctorate in management from Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. Her master’s in business administration comes from Michigan State University. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Wayne State University. She lives in Brighton, MI, with her husband, Paul, and their kids, Ally and Adam, as well as their dog, Rex.
Cheri B. Torres specializes in leadership, team development, and whole system strategic planning. She is the lead catalyst at Collaborative by Design, a consulting firm that she founded in 2009. She’s taught thousands of trainers and teachers around the world in the use and practice of Experiential Learning, Appreciative Inquiry, and other strengths-based processes. She has worked in many sectors, including corporate, government, education, and nonprofit, focusing on shared leadership, teamwork, and collective impact. She holds a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Tennessee, as well as a master’s in transpersonal psychology. She lives in Asheville, NC, with her husband Michael, and their dog, Annabelle, and cat, Ziggy.
LINKS:
Conversations Worth Having: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Fuel Productive and Meaningful Engagement
Full Transcript
BRAD PHILLIPS, HOST, THE SPEAK GOOD PODCAST:
You’ve probably heard the expression that it’s not what you say but how you say it. Indeed, sometimes, the way you say, or frame things, can make a very big difference in whether or not you achieve the outcome you desire.
As an example, authors Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin, and Robert Cialdini – who teamed up for the book YES! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion – offer a case study from Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. It seems that visitors to the park had been stealing wood – 14 tons worth per year – and a team of behavioral scientists created two signs to try to figure out which one would reduce theft the most.
One sign they tried carried a negative message: “Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the natural state of the Petrified Forest.”
The other sign carried a more neutral one: “Please don’t remove the petrified wood from the park, in order to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest.”
Which one worked? Well, the neutral one resulted in less theft. But the one with the negative framing, the one that highlighted the fact that many past visitors had removed wood? That one tripled theft. As the authors noted, “When the social proof for a situation indicates that an undesirable behavior occurs with regrettably high frequency, it might indeed cause unintentional damage to publicize this information.” The negative sign, the authors concluded, “was not a crime prevention strategy; it was a crime promotion strategy.”
As I said, it’s not what you say but how you say it. So, let’s apply similar logic to the business world. You might have a scenario like this:
You’re a manager, and 40 percent of your staff infuriatingly strolls through the front doors late every day. It slows down your work. It delays meetings. And, it’s just plain disrespectful to the people who make it in on time every day. How should you as the manager go about trying to reduce that tardiness? Should you use a negative message, “Hey, almost half of you are late every day, and that’s unacceptable.” Or, do you consider a more positive framing: “To the 60 percent of you who are at your desks and ready to work on time each day, good work.”
Which one is more likely to drive success and help you achieve your goals? Well, the answer to that is that it depends – and there’s not evidence to suggest that one approach always works better than the other one. If your job is at risk and you need the paycheck, you’ll probably hustle to make it in on time more frequently.
But the question itself does get to a truth about the way many of us think when we spot a problem. Even that phrasing – spotting a problem – is different from thinking of it as spotting an opportunity. Instead, we tend to spot a problem, think about why it’s a problem, and contemplate how we might fix the problem – and then talk about it with our employee, or our team, or our staff in terms of the problem.
As my guests today will make clear, sometimes, shifting our own mindset, resulting in a shift about how we talk about our concerns – can result in something far more powerful.
Jackie Stavros and Cheri Torres are the co-authors of Conversations Worth Having: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Fuel Productive and Meaningful Engagement, which is now available in a new second edition.
In it, they detail techniques to help you tune in, ask generative questions, and frame your concerns positively. And to be clear, for the skeptics in the crowd and, to be honest, I have this question, too, being more positive isn’t a recipe for ignoring or brushing over real problems – but rather using better tools to solve them more productively.
Jackie Stavros has more than 30 years of leadership, strategy, organization development and change management experience. She’s also a professor at Michigan’s Lawrence Technological University College of Business and IT.
Cheri Torres is the lead catalyst at Collaborative by Design. She’s taught thousands of trainers and teachers around the world in the use and practice of Experiential Learning, Appreciative Inquiry, and other strengths-based processes.
We’ll discuss how you can have conversations worth having in your professional life, yes – but also how you might be able to use some of those tools in your personal life, too.
(MUSIC PLAYS)
So, first of all, Jackie and Cheri, as I told you off air, I really enjoyed your book. And, I’m glad the two of you are here because you also represent something new for The Speak Good Podcast, which is it’s the first time we’ve ever spoken to two guests instead of one. So, thank you for helping us break this new format in.
Let’s begin in with the basics and the book is largely about Appreciative Inquiry. So, let’s start there. Maybe with what you mean by that term, and also what you think about when you say conversations worth having.
JACKIE STAVROS: Okay, I’ll start with Appreciative Inquiry and then I’ll throw it over to Cheri on conversations worth having. So, think of Appreciative Inquiry as an approach for discovering the best in your people, your teams, the organizations, the community. And Appreciative Inquiry can be used to fuel productive and meaningful engagement. If you take the word appreciative, it means appreciating others, adding value, appreciating the situation. So, that’s a very powerful word is to appreciate. And inquiry is asking questions, curious, it’s a process of discovering. So, you put it together, and it’s a way of figuring out the best of what was, what is and what can be.
PHILLIPS: And Cheri on the conversations worth having piece. How do you define a conversation worth having?
CHERI TORRES: It’s hard to define because there are many, many conversations worth having. I think the easiest way for people to define and understand what it is is we know when we’re having a conversation worth having. We are energized. We’re feeling connected. We’re open. And, we’re moving towards what we want more of. We’re adding value. Whoever we’re speaking with is also adding value. And one of the things that Jackie and I realized as we were writing this book with a goal, really, to bring Appreciative Inquiry into the general population, is after many, many iterations on the book, we realized it really boils down to our conversations. And, everything we do is conversation and how we have those conversations is life changing.
PHILLIPS:
And we’ll get into this part later, but I did appreciate that you talked about that idea of a conversation being both external and internal. It’s also about how you’re talking to yourself, which inevitably shapes the quality or lack thereof of the conversation that you’re having. And, one thing that I really appreciated about the book, and you went out of your way to make this point, is that Appreciative Inquiry is not about avoiding difficult conversations. It’s not about avoiding what you describe as critical situations or mistakes or problems or inappropriate behavior. So, maybe you could just talk a little bit there. I think you even used the language in the book of saying we are not Pollyannaish and suggesting you should put on your rose-colored glasses. So, could you talk a little bit more about that?
TORRES:
Again, it goes back to what Jackie said about appreciative being to add value or to value what is. And, I think the outcomes of Appreciative Inquiry and the outcomes of a conversation worth having are positive emotions, a feeling of positivity. But, it doesn’t mean that the questions you’re asking, or the full conversation is always positive. For example, if someone has just experienced something traumatic or they’ve had a life of some traumatic difficulties, to jump in and try to have them focus on just being positive really may not add any value at all. The person may feel dismissed, unseen. And so, asking questions even about that trauma, to widen the view of widen the screen, so to speak, about the person, their story, how it’s impacted them actually adds a great deal of value. And, the person then feels seen, they feel heard, they open up, they feel safe. And from that place, they’re much more capable of beginning to look and see what else might be possible for them.
STAVROS:
And I would also add, I was in a strategic planning meeting yesterday and somebody made a position statement and another person said, Oh, I disagree with you. Then, I just stepped up. And I said, you know, we all have different perspectives. And so, the outcomes of a conversation worth having is shared understanding. The three of us may have three different perspectives. We make the invisible visible. So, what do you think? And it gives new information and possibilities that get people engaged in opening up and connected versus shutting down and saying, you know, I disagree or you’re wrong, because then you’re putting people into a protect mode.
PHILLIPS:
And when you say you’re wrong, the conversation kind of shuts down. You use the language in the book of get curious. And that’s exactly the thing. If you get curious and even if you disagree and your initial instinct is to say, I don’t think that’s right, to say, tell me a little bit more about that. Why do you think that’s so important? You’re not committing yourself to ultimately agreeing with that point of view, but at least you give yourself the benefit of information gathering and maybe gaining some context that otherwise wouldn’t have come your way. And so, there’s real value in that – get curious.
TORRES:
Exactly.
STAVROS:
You got it.
PHILLIPS:
The conversations worth having framework, you lay out this very simple, and I use that word as a compliment – it’s not simplistic, but it’s simple – is these three parts. You talk about tuning in, asking generative questions and positive framing. I’m hoping we could take those one at a time, even though, again, in your book, you point out that sometimes those things don’t happen in a very clean sequence. They could happen in every single direction. But, maybe, we could begin with tuning in and just give me a sense of what you mean by that term.
STAVROS:
All right. So, think of tuning in is as it’s me listening to you. So, tuning in is, we call this your body mindset. And first asking yourself, where am I? We’ve talked about the word appreciative. Am I above the line, ready to come into this conversation? Or am I below the line, depreciative and not in a good space? And we have these unconscious biases that sometimes take us below the line, and it can be as simple as not getting enough sleep, not drinking enough water, the time of the day. Unconscious biases can be words that people use. Your beliefs. Where you’re coming from. So, to really tune in, before we’re going to have a conversation, Brad, where am I? Am I above the line? And I’m in that place. And, in the first step we talk about, or a practice of tuning in, is just to pause and breathe. Just pausing and breathing resets the chemicals in your body. It resets your body mindset that you can become curious and get into using these two practices.
PHILLIPS:
Can you just define a little bit, I know from your book, what you mean by below the line and above the line, but can you explain what that means? And maybe even just give a concrete example of, let’s say I’m frustrated and let’s say that I’m the manager of a large firm. One of my employees is continually missing a deadline. You give that example in the book. And so, my mindset is I’m angry, I’m irritated. Come on, you keep missing your deadlines. That’s obviously below the line in terms of my own mindset. So, when you are doing a good job of tuning in, how do you get that above the line? And what does that even mean?
TORRES:
If you imagine kind of a horizontal line on a piece of paper and appreciative conversations, conversations worth having and affirmative conversations, are above the line. They add value. And, below the line is depreciative conversations. And when we’re below the line, we are in a place of judgment, blame, shame, as you mentioned, frustration or anger, we’re irritable. And, all of us know that when we start a conversation from that place, the conversation is going to be below the line. So, it’s going to be depreciative, either destructive or critical. So, this idea that Jackie talked about with tuning in, as soon as you realize, you know, I’m in this place, to just pause. And pausing interrupts the neural pattern. We often have automatic negative thoughts. They just happen. If we can interrupt that by pausing, it, as Jackie mentioned, shifts the neurochemicals. It kind of slows down the cortisol and the testosterone. And then when we breathe, breathing deeply actually activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which further calms our nervous system. And once we can get the nervous system calm enough, then we can get curious. And curiosity is a positive emotion, which throws us into the executive functions of the brain. And that’s where we can connect with other people. Be curious. Be creative. Access higher order thinking. That’s where our emotional intelligence sits. So those three steps, although, again, as you say, simple, but not simplistic, they actually are having a significant impact on our neurophysiology, which allows us to then step into the driver’s seat and intentionally lead those conversations. So, they can be above the line.
PHILLIPS:
And Jackie, maybe you could jump in with the example in the book that, as somebody who has kids in the school system, they’re in first and third grade now, I really, the example you gave about the student who had two different teachers with two very different worldviews and how those teachers had that, I think you described a moment in the lunchroom, where were speaking about the same student together. They had such drastically different interpretations of how well that kid was doing or not doing in the class. Can you give that example? I thought that was a really a nice way of explaining why tuning in is so important and really dramatically can change the outcome of a conversation.
STAVROS:
Yeah. I love that story, especially if you have kids. You know, I’m a professor and we can be talking about the same person and two different people give that person two different personalities. And when I think of the story of Jamal, one teacher said how helpful he was, his sense of humor, his auditory senses, and the other person came from he needs to pay attention. He needs to look out the window. They were talking about the same student, but two different outcomes from him. And so that begins to show that our images, our words, they create our world and the people that we are dealing with. And it gives, you know, Jamal is just thriving in this one class and struggling in this other class, because of the perceptions and the perspectives coming from the teachers.
PHILLIPS:
And if I remember the example correctly, there was something about the glancing outside of the window, where he was, I guess what he was thinking, his natural impulse was to look out the window. And one teacher saw that as he’s distracted and not paying attention. And the other one, I think, got curious and asked, what are you thinking about or asked some kind of question. I don’t remember the detail there.
STAVROS:
He was actually thinking about what the teacher was talking about and what was going on in the classroom, but he needed to look away and to look outside the window. So, he was paying attention in the classroom.
TORRES:
You mentioned that teacher getting curious. It’s that instead of being quick to judge, it’s to ask why. And she was aware that auditory learners often need to not have visual input in order to hear, because they’re picking up so many things. She didn’t jump to that conclusion, but she wondered, I wonder whether he’s auditory.
STAVROS:
And if you’re a parent or a teacher listening, or a coach, just to ask somebody, so why did you write off topic? And that was one of the questions she asked, tell me why. And she got a really good understanding. And then they came up with a system. So, when he’s wondering or thinking, he’s not sure, he learns to ask a question because when the teacher answers, she’s not going to give him a critical answer and she’s going to be able to help him grow and learn.
PHILLIPS:
It seems like so much of what we’re talking about is confirmation bias. I always think of this example, a friend of mine told me a story that his father was elderly. He used a walker and one day he pulled up in front of a restaurant and it was blocking traffic. So, for those 30 seconds or so it took to drop his father off in front of the restaurant, so he didn’t have to walk across the parking lot, he was admittedly blocking traffic. And so, you could look at it in two different ways. One way is to say what an inconsiderate jerk, blocking traffic. Oh, he’s the king of the world. He thinks he could do anything he wants. And the other way, I guess, is to just get curious and say, I wonder what’s going on there. Maybe there’s an explanation that makes sense. And it’s a reminder. I use that story as my own kind of metaphor to remind myself, maybe there’s a man in that car who’s having a tough time getting to the front door. And it slows me down a little bit. And it sounds like that’s the Jamal thing in some measure as well. Next in your framework is generative questions. What is a generative question?
TORRES:
A generative question is a question that widens the screen. We tend to see the world, as you just mentioned, confirmation bias. We are biased in how we see the world. We all have a world view, and then we seek to confirm it. And a generative question says, maybe not this, maybe this. And so, it widens your screen. I had a colleague of mine who was a psychotherapist and he put a one foot by one foot square behind his desk. And before every client session, he would stand in that square. For 30 to 60 seconds, he would remind himself, this is all I know, what’s standing right in this square. And it drove him to be very curious about everybody who walked through the door, because he wasn’t making assumptions about anything.
PHILLIPS:
That is an amazing centering exercise. I love that. And Jackie, could you maybe give some examples of what generative questions sound like? Give me maybe a couple of examples of what kind of questions one might ask.
STAVROS:
I’ll give you a few examples. One is kind of challenge your own thinking. So, as you’re in the conversation you might ask, what else is explaining their behavior or what really happened? What am I making up? If there’s others in the room you want to encourage, how do you see it, Brad? People come from different places. Tell me how maybe they solved this problem at another place where you came from. And my favorite, favorite question is always the wish question. And, and it’s to say, so tell me, what are your wishes? And really pause to let them think about what are my wishes?
TORRES:
And generative questions typically do four things. They will make the invisible, visible. They will create shared understanding. They will generate new knowledge. And they will inspire innovative and creative possibilities.
PHILLIPS:
I wasn’t sure where the Alicia Patel story fit in, whether it was generative questions or the next step that we’ll get to in a few minutes, positive framing. I think it’s probably a combination of both. So maybe we could use that as an example of generative questions. Could you just share that example of how she changed her own mindset and asked? I think I don’t want to give away the headline, but she stunned her staff a little bit.
TORRES:
Sure. Alicia Patel is a senior VP at a hospital system. She’s in charge of quality control and the hospital over a three-year period had grown significantly, merging with other hospitals in the region where it was or where it is. That was highly beneficial from a financial perspective, but it was causing a lot of stress on staff. And Alicia was watching patient satisfaction scores slowly and gradually decline as the system got larger. And as you can imagine, her job is dependent upon quality. So, watching these statistics drop, put her in a place of anxiety. She was below the line. So, she would meet with her nurse managers on a regular basis and kind of jump on them. What are you doing? Why is this happening? All of the kind of critical, negative, judgmental questions that generated a below-the-line conversation. And, it triggered the same kind of response in the nurse managers. They got defensive and kept reiterating over and over that there’s nothing we can do about it. We’re short-staffed. Our nurses are working double shifts. This went on for almost three years. And she finally got so frustrated that she began to look outside the system. And she happened to land on a website that was advertising a training program in Appreciative Inquiry, specifically for healthcare. So, she jumped on it. It looked like it would be something novel and creative. Before the end of the first day, Alicia realized that she had been part of the problem. Her body mindset was below the line. Her questions were below the line. At the end of the training, she vowed to change things when she went back. And so, the first thing she did at the next meeting was to apologize for years of kind of hammering on the staff.
You can imagine they were kind of like what? She told them a little bit about Appreciative Inquiry. And then she said, I realize patient satisfaction is not zero. You have lots of patients that are satisfied, don’t you? And they’re all like Yeah, we get thank you notes. We get flowers. They send us candy. And she said, I want you to pay attention to those patients over the next week. And the nurses that are caring for them, ask questions, find out what are people doing that’s generating high patient satisfaction. And the nurses actually left for the first time with smiles on their faces. When they came back the next week, when she walked into the room, it was buzzing with lots of conversation, which she hadn’t heard in years. And as they went around the room to share stories of what was working, many of them said we have, we didn’t wait for this meeting. We already started implementing new things and it’s making a difference. And by the end of the meeting, they had a full wall full of ideas for people to make a difference in the lives of their patients. And the nurse managers left. She sat there and she thought, wow, that seems way too easy. I wonder what the statistics are going to look like. Sure enough, when the next quarterly reports came out, patient satisfaction was up on every single floor and one unit had a hundred percent patient satisfaction.
PHILLIPS:
Unbelievable.
TORRES:
It’s just from that idea of flipping to focus on what you want and to go search for where is that already happening and how do we expand that and make more of that?
STAVROS:
Yup.
PHILLIPS:
You’re reminding me … there’s an author named Chip Heath who has written books … you know Chip. Okay. He was a guest on a recent episode of our podcast and in one of his books, he and his brother Dan wrote about bright spots. And it sounds very much that what you’re talking about here is a bright spot that instead of, I think in one of his books, he gives the example of people weren’t meeting deadlines of submitting some sort of report. And rather than the HR manager blasting them and saying you 33 percent of department managers are not compliant. He sent something out saying two-thirds of department managers have been compliant. Great job, everyone! For those of you who haven’t, and so he was also psychologically using that as a way to encourage the laggers because they weren’t with the majority, which is also uncomfortable. The other thing I love about that example you just gave is you, one of the things I always say, is that if we have a training that doesn’t go as well as we had wanted it to, the easy thing to do is say they were a tough client. The hard thing to do is to say, it’s not on them. It is our job to be able to turn around any situation. And if we were unable to do that, we need to figure out why and try to learn from it to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Or, we could respond in different ways next time. And it sounds like that example with the nursing team was exactly that, too. When you ask those two types of questions, that’s empowering
STAVROS:
You’re right. And it draws people into the conversation and it really, as Cheri showed, it inspires engagement before people are telling you what to do. They know what to do and they’re learning and they’re seeing the difference it’s making.
PHILLIPS:
Yes. Jackie, could you also talk about the third part of that three- part framework, positive framing?
STAVROS:
So positive framing is, and we said this earlier that there are things going wrong on your teams, your organizations, and so you have to address it. So, the first thing is you name it. And in the example that Cheri gave the problem was low-patient satisfaction metrics. They all agreed that was a problem. So, you have to flip it. You name the positive opposite, which is pretty easy, you know, well we want high-patient satisfaction, high-patient metrics, but you have to keep moving. And then you have to ask the people in the conversation. So, if we have high-patient satisfaction, if the positive opposite is true, then, then what does it look like here? And that’s where we call the framing comes into play. And people are saying, well, patients are delighted with care and service. And so, they begin to come up with the frame to discover, you know, what are examples of positive quality care? What is it that we need to be doing more of? So, you began working on the frame that does direct and indirectly address the problem, but it’s much more than the problem. It’s just a different way of being and thinking and doing in organizations today.
PHILLIPS:
I’d like to shift, for a moment, the conversation from what we’ve been talking about up to this point, which is really the individual level or the small group level, the one-on-one conversations or small group, and shift the focus to more of the larger groups, whether it’s in a setting where you’re speaking to hundreds of people on a stage, or you’re speaking to entire companies and organizations, or maybe even a political party. And the question then is how do you use this idea of Appreciative Inquiry? Cheri, I’ll use your pronunciation of that word because I, I say inquiry, you say inquiry, it sounds so much more refined when you say it, so I’ll go with that. How do you is Appreciative Inquiry when you are talking about a much larger scale in terms of the group size?
TORRES:
It is really the same kinds of conversations, but you scale it. So, people are still in one-on-one conversations, they’re still in small group convers, but you have those conversations all at the same time. This is actually, for 20 or 30 years, the foundation of where Appreciative Inquiry was. There’s a process called the five D cycle. It moves people through a process of discovery, which they do in pairs and small groups. Then into dream, which is imagining the future we want, grounded in our strengths. If the nurse managers have found all these places where we’re strong in serving patients, then the dream is how can we bring that to every patient. And then that creates a shared vision amongst the whole groups. So small groups are having those dream conversations and then they share out with the whole, and it’s kind of this weaving pattern of small group to whole group to small group. And, it’s about thinking divergently together first and then converging on the design. What is it that we want to do? How do we want to get towards that future we are imagining together? And then what specific action steps are we going to take and how can we deploy all of us to a achieve that? I think Jackie has one of her stories about the turning the company around that was going to close. It’s such a powerful story. Will you share that Jackie?
STAVROS:
Sure. It’s not in our book, but one of the first stories when we were dealing with this is I had to go to a manufacturing plant in the Midwest that was going to be shut down. And so, supposedly the good news is the people at the plant were going to have a conversation of how to shut the plant down over three years, so that it didn’t impact immediately the lives of the 400 people in the plant, the Midwest town it was in. That it would be a successful closure. So, I remember driving up on a Sunday night and the meeting started out on Monday morning and I kept thinking about what I had to do and what the positive opposite was, you know, close the plant, let’s keep it open. So, when I entered the conversation, they were not happy to see me because I was the facilitator that would be helping them facilitate, as Cheri just said, how were we going to shut this plant down? And I threw out a frame and I said to the group, I said, well, what if we came up with a revitalization plan? And, they all pretty much had their arms folded and looked at me and they’re like, we’re on the shutdown list. This conglomerate has plants that are open and plants that are shut down. And I said, what if we designed a revitalization list and that, if in one year, 12 months from today, you guys can’t revitalize this plant, you just shut down in two years. Why do we need three years to shut down? And we asked the holding company to give the people who are the closest to what’s in this plant, an attempt to revitalize it. And it took four hours to kind of get them to see and shift their mindsets. And then they spent a day and a half, as Cheri just explained, going through the Ds here of discovering the strengths of the plant. Their dream to keep it open, revitalize it, designing about a dozen initiatives and how they would deploy it. And the plant manager went to the holding company and the plant has never shut down.
PHILLIPS:
Wow.
STAVROS:
But, they had a plan to shut down in two years instead of three years, but they asked for a second genuine chance and now there was a category called a revitalization opportunity and that’s framing.
PHILLIPS:
Wow! Thank you for sharing that bonus content that didn’t make it into your book. That is a great story. And, you know, the public speaking setting, which you’re reminding me of is – we had a guest on the podcast a while back named Faith Kern. She wrote a book called Getting to the Heart of Science Communications. And she was talking about even in a large group that sometimes you can help people get their feelings out. And by just turning to the person next to you and just have a brief conversation with them. And what I’m thinking about now is I wonder if, in that moment, you instead use it to ask a generative question. If, in many ways, you are able to maybe bring a group of people that’s sitting in front of you, that’s below the line, and bring them above the line just by asking the right question and giving them space to answer it.
STAVROS:
And, I would say this. This story happened in 2007, but I’ll never forget the story. But, Cheri and I have worked together, which is great is we found this language that people really like. Well, these people were all below the line when I walked into the room and sometimes people, and we got above the line, but it took a good four hours to move 140 people above the line to get them into that mindset, that body mindset that they could say, well, there is something good, and there is a possibility. And so, we had the 5D cycle that facilitated the conversation, which it was planned. How do we have a conversation with 140 people? And as Cheri mentioned, they had one-on-ones. Then they had teams and then they reported out. And by the end of a day-and-a-half, they had the strengths identified. They had the initiatives, the vision, and they also had a promise to shut the plant down in two years if it did not revitalize. That they worked on outside the meeting, but they just had a totally different mindset. And corporate was okay. The conglomerate was fine because all they kept saying, well, three years you got to shut down or stay open. And they stayed open
PHILLIPS:
Amazing. Also, four hours to move 140 people above the line actually doesn’t sound like that much time. I would imagine these people who know that their livelihood is coming to an end, at least that chapter of it, there’s some trauma involved in that.
STAVROS:
There was trauma.
PHILLIPS:
There’s some real fear. And so, the fact that you were able to do that in four hours, I think is miraculous.
STAVROS:
It felt like eternity at the moment. It wasn’t that long.
PHILLIPS:
Yes. I’ve led some of those sessions. I know exactly what you’re talking about. What’s the expression when you’re raising young children, it’s something like every minute feels like a year and every year feels like a minute. I can imagine that kind of circumstance feels exactly like that. I want to end by asking a question and giving another example. The same friend, actually, that I mentioned with his father, I’ll have to flag this episode for him and say we’re talking about you. The same one whose father couldn’t walk to the door without a walker told me a story. He was a manager of a sales team. And I should just preface it by saying, I don’t know the context of what happened with his management style before all of this. But I do know a lot about him, and he is amiable and friendly and warm and easygoing and supportive and so many positive adjectives that I would think makes him a great manager to work for and with, but his annoyance at his team over whatever the issue was had finally reached a fever pitch.
And he described in one meeting that he kind of lost his temper a little bit. He had a pencil in his hand, and he threw it. It was one of those ceilings where, if the pencil hits it, the pencil could just stick up in the ceiling. And he said there was this silence where the entire room just stared at the pencil, and they were stunned because it was so unlike anything he had ever done before. And he described that moment as being transformative for the team because they realized, wow, if we’ve driven him to that, that’s really something we better pay attention to. I’m not encouraging throwing objects, but I am curious, are there times when approaches, other than Appreciative Inquiry is the right method to choose?
TORRES:
Yes. And I think it varies. If there’s an emergency situation, you need somebody to take control and tell people what to do quickly, because maybe lives are at stake. If you’re having surgery, you don’t want the group of people in there trying to figure out what are our strengths and what’s the best strategy. If something goes wrong, you want people to respond immediately. The other thing, I think, also that if you’re getting to a breaking point, like your friend that you just described, you know, one way of doing that, which probably was not his intention, is that all the background just explodes out into the foreground, and everybody can see it. And they’re like, oh. But the other way you can do that is to just pause, take a deep breath, and explain what is about to come out, because I’ve been doing this and this and this. And I have reached a breaking point. I can’t take this anymore. And you can do it from a place of telling people what’s background. And if you can do it in a really honest, very firm way, it may not be the most appreciative conversation, but it’s value add, right? I said yes, and now I am going to go back for just a moment to say any conversation including a one-way conversation, if it is adding value, it’s above the line. As long as part of what is going on, like in an emergency situation, everybody recognizes there’s this tension because people may be afraid of what might happen, but none of it’s being taken personally, because it’s all about managing the crisis. When there are personal issues at stake, it’s really easy to fall below the line, because we’re not making, we’re not making that background. What’s in the backstory. We’re not making it forefront for people to see. And if you bring it into the forefront, then you can have a conversation about the line about it.
STAVROS:
And I would just add really quickly, seeing where Cheri’s moving, if you think of Appreciative Inquiry where we started today. So, Appreciative Inquiry is a philosophy. It’s a way of being, and we defined it to the listeners. This book really goes into these two practices and this tuning-in technique that I think you can use anytime, anywhere, any situation. We talked about the 5D cycle and there’s 60 other methods out there in the world to use. So be very intentional. If you want to bring people together to have a conversation and you want to take the time to frame it. When you are going to use this cycle, you’re going to use positive framing, you’re going to use generative questions. There are actually principles of AI going behind this. So, you have choices and you’re saying, yes, Appreciative Inquiry, and this 5D cycle, is something we want to use or not. And when you’re in a mechanistic system and your car’s broken or your toilet’s dysfunctioning, there’s no time to do the five D cycle. You want to fix it. But, going back how Cheri said, let’s go back and think about this, when you have a conversation, always try to tune in, try to get above the line and try these practices. And sometimes, when you’re in that destructive or that critical conversation, it’s a long pause. The pause could go on for a day. You will come back or someone else. That’s why this is simple, but it just takes practice.
PHILLIPS:
That’s a great place to leave our conversation. I can’t tell you how much I appreciated the conversation and for easing us into this two-guest format, which I think worked very nicely. Jackie Stavros, Cheri Torres, thank you both very much for joining us.
STAVROS:
Thank you, Brad.
TORRES:
Thank you. Thanks so much for having us.
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