Business Services
Strategic
Services
Strategic
Planning & Visioning
Strategic business planning takes on a whole new
meaning when it is grounded in the assets, successes, and core strengths
of the whole system and reinforced with positive images of the future.
Strategic planning and strategic action become inextricably linked.
Success
Stories
Sustainable
Enterprises and Corporate Responsibility
Doing good and sustaining profitability over time
go hand in hand. Increasingly, the most successful companies are
those focused on the triple bottom line: people, profits, and planet.
At Green
Mountain Coffee Roasters, leadership in social responsibility
translates into a high sense of purpose, meaning, and value, igniting
high levels of performance, rapid growth and pride. AI methodologies
help companies tap into high purpose and engage people at every
level, calling on businesses to become “Agents
of World Benefit.”
When Green Mountain Coffee Roasters employees made a trip to Guatemala
and Mexico several months ago they took with them Frontline producer
Sam Quinonoes and a television crew. They captured the important
story of Fair Trade Coffee and why it matters so much.
The Frontline show featuring Sam Quinones' trip with GMCR employees
to Guatemala and Mexico is scheduled to air May 22nd and 23rd, 2003.
Frontline has been highly reviewed for its documentaries , with
some saying it is the best new show on the air. Seeing the show
will help viewers to understand the coffee industry and the larger
issues around global sustainability and even world peace. Peace
comes from understanding, compassion and appreciation of others
and their situations. We encourage everyone who is engaged in thinking
about the subject of what it means for Business to be an Agent of
Benefit to tune into this program.
Customer
Service
The often-quoted story here is that of a muffler
company who had a 95% satisfaction rating with customers. They decided
to make it 100% and began calling the 5% of dissatisfied customers
to find out what went wrong. The result? Satisfaction ratings plummeted.
There’s a moral to this story: you get what you’re looking
for.
AI is based on the belief that “words create
worlds”. By inquiring into and appreciating what’s working,
valued, and desired most in customer service, images of possibility
and achievement become not only believable, but also mobilized.
Success
Stories
Marketing & Branding
AI is highly useful in marketing and branding in
that it evokes a process for understanding your product/service’s
unique value proposition, competitive position and designing strategic,
innovative approaches to targeting, expanding, and nurturing customer
confidence.
Success
Stories
Supply Chain Management
AI engages the whole system in a rapid and democratic
discovery of strengths and future possibilities, empowering all
facets of the supply chain—from supplier to customer—to
collectively design and deliver in a manner that ignites innovation,
improved productivity, and performance. AI is a powerful process
for identifying complex interdependencies in supply chain management
and enhancing the relationships that form the building blocks of
organizational sustainability in rapidly changing markets.
Mergers & Partnerships
Mergers and new partnerships work when the merging
cultures develop relational strength, a clear understanding of the
new expanded asset base, and a shared perspective on the future.
AI makes this possible by bringing to light the full organizational
capacities of all partners, enabling the collective goals to be
realized.
Process
Improvement
Whether creating new or redesigning existing processes for increased
effectiveness, an AI approach enables participatory process design
to best match the organization's unique business demands, goals,
and changing environment. From discovering internal best practices,
to benchmarking, to co-constructing processes – AI unleashes
the collective wisdom of interdependent groups to ensure optimal
process effectiveness
Success
Stories
 Organizational
Change and Transformation Services
Whole Systems Change
Consider the idea of positive change – an exploration
of what is true, good and possible in order to speed and energize
the process of organizational transformation. Some call this “Change
at the Speed of Imagination.” The AI Summit methodology engages
the “whole system” by involving a cross-section of as
many interested parties as is practical. That means more diversity
and less hierarchy than is usual in a working meeting, and a chance
for each person to be heard and to learn other ways of looking at
the task at hand.
Success
Stories
Culture
Change and Transformation
Organizational culture has often been referred to
as the set of shared values and beliefs that determine “how
things are done around here”. In this way, culture is an enabler
for an organizations performance and represents the most significant
leverage point for transformational change to occur. Yet in most
cultural change efforts, the tendency is to throw the “baby
out with the bath water” inadvertently discounting the values
and beliefs that people hold in hopes of re-programming the organization.
Repeatedly this meets with resistance and failure. By using AI the
organization taps into the strength of its cultural values and beliefs,
engages the hearts and minds of its people and unleashes the reservoir
of human potential that is really needed to transform the organization.
Success
Stories
Organizational
Design
The post industrial era is evidenced by the highly-networked,
multi-cultural, and geographically distributed organizations in
existence today. To support the creation of these new organizational
forms requires new types of organizational design — specifically,
emergent organizational design. The AI approach assists in designing/redesigning
organizations for a rapidly changing environment — designing
for both what is known and unknown about the future. The outcome:
flexible, adaptable, responsive, and networked organizations which
are uniquely designed for success.
Change Leader/Agent
Development
Making sustainable change a reality in organizations requires much
more than the support and involvement of executive leadership, it
requires having people at all levels of the organization who see
themselves acting as agents of change. By developing a diverse network
of change leaders, organizations build the internal capacity they
need to implement even the most radical of change agendas.
Communication
Where transformation is the heart, communications are the arteries
of any successful change effort. AI is a highly effective method
for building and maintaining communication by enabling the identification
of key stakeholders, messages, and venues that embrace dialogue
and facilitate awareness, belonging, and support for the change
agenda.
Organizational
Learning and Human Capacity Development
Knowledge
Management
The knowledge of an organization is socially held
and deeply embedded in the discourse of the organization. AI maximizes
organizational capacities for knowledge management by evoking new
streams of discourse and inspiring consistent, whole systems inquiry
into the relational capacities of knowledge sharing and organizational
learning. AI has been used to make explicit the implicit knowledge
of organizations’ processes and systems.
Success
Stories
Innovation and Creativity
The push for innovation requires a different kind
of learning, one that goes beyond adapting to challenges and solving
problems and instead focuses on imagining possibilities—on
generating new ways of looking at the world. This is appreciative
learning—the art of valuing and inquiring into possibility.
Success
Stories
Mentoring
Imagine an approach to discovering, creating, and
nurturing learning partnerships built on trust, respect, openness,
and a mutual desire and commitment to raising one’s potential.
AI is such an approach, making possible mentoring partnerships that
align individual and organizational strengths, values, and learning
goals. As a result, mutually satisfying relationships are created
which effectively share and transfer professional, technical, and
consulting knowledge, skills, and competencies.
Diversity
Programs
Imagine workplaces and communities where high quality
relationships among people of different generations, ethnicities,
and genders thrive - where open, just, and inclusive leadership
is the norm, and where the unique
similarities and differences that people bring are discovered, contributed,
celebrated, and mutually enriched over time. Appreciative inquiry
transforms our highest hopes and dreams for the rich possibilities
of diversity into reality.
Success
Stories
Cross Cultural
Communication
Today’s workplaces look increasingly like the
world itself, with employees from multiple cultures working side
by side on management teams, project teams and in virtually all
departments of the organization. AI’s search for strengths
leads each to see the other as an asset to the whole and brings
people together to envision the future they want to create.
Implementation
Services
When IT works best, it is a seamless part of the
organizational discourse and a vital support to the core strengths.
This means IT professionals are focused broadly on technology and
on those throughout the system whom technology is serving. When
this happens IT becomes an engine for positive change and implementation
of powerful new ideas.
Performance
Management Systems and Appraisals
Imagine an approach to evaluating employees that
inspires them to expand their understanding of themselves and their
work and that leaves them more aware than ever of the strengths
and specialties they bring to the organization and the ones they
will want to develop to contribute more completely.
Success
Stories
Rewards/Recognition
Systems
Everyone wants to feel appreciated. This fact lies
at the heart of AI—enabling a process that recognizes, appreciates,
and rewards successes and achievements and breathes life into individual,
group, and organizational effectiveness. AI helps to discover exceptional
rewards and recognition systems—formal and informal—that
align to the unique individual and organizational preferences and
motivate extraordinary performance
Success
Stories
Training Design
and Delivery
One of the concerns of any organization engaging
in a new theory or method is sustainability. How do we make sure
the entire organization is deeply engaged and incorporating organizational
capacity development into current and new work structures? AIC can
customize an in-house training so that it is speaking directly to
everyone in the organization about their actual people, departments,
and work. In addition, AIC offers training sessions and workshops
on Appreciative Inquiry in numerous locations around the globe.
Success
Stories
Appreciative Inquiry
Workshops
Success
Stories
Teaming and
Collaboration Services
Team Development
Appreciative Inquiry is about building relationships
and capacity in teams. AI allows team members to discover more about
who they are and how they see the future. They thrive because the
AI process also helps them connect across functional areas and see
the larger picture. Full voice, community, rigorous inquiry, shared
speculation, visualizing the future, articulation of things that
matter, improvisation – these are the ingredients of AI that
lead to high performing teams.
Success
Stories
Collaborative
Networks
Collaborative networks range from dyadic partnerships engaged in
short term local projects, to worldwide constellations of organizations
and citizens networked together to generate global social change.
For example, inter-sectoral partnerships link government, business,
non-governmental organizations, and communities in addressing areas
of common concern. Businesses enter intra- and international joint
ventures, alliances, networks, and other forms of collaboration
in order to reap the benefits of mutual learning, exploration, development,
and economic advantage. AI elicits and nurtures the development
of shared purpose, principles, and relationships that are vital
to the evolution of collaborative networks that thrive. Examples
of AI applications include the birth of the United Religions Initiative
(www.uri.org), an unprecedented
grassroots, global interfaith organization, the development of a
US-India biotech joint venture, and capacity building in Los Angeles
County.
Success
Stories
Dialogue
Dialogue is a relatively new approach to understanding,
generating meaning, and solidifying organizational culture. AI proves
to be a powerful method of dialogue because of its inquiry-driven
design, which evokes high point stories and images of the future.
Success
Stories
Partnerships
and Alliances
Partnership and alliance relationships between individuals
or organizations offer tremendous opportunities to expand financial
resources, increase creativity, advance learning, and broaden the
impact. AI can bring diverse people and organizations together to
discover the "best of" partnering experiences. "Best"
stories can engage hearts and minds in creating a shared vision,
open up scores of possibilities, energize and ignite people in partnership
or alliances with a desire to take action together.
Success
Stories
Philanthropic
and Social Change
Corporate
Social Responsibility
Much needed in business is a conversation that lifts
us out of polarization and toward a new language beyond even that
of socially responsible business, ethical practices or good corporate
citizenship. AI encourages the creation of novel visions of organizational
leadership for building sustainable economies, ecologies, and societies
that work toward the benefit of all.
Social Action
Citizen action from Austria to Chicago, powered by Appreciative
Inquiry , helps citizen groups "Imagine" a positive future
for their community, city or country. Those engaged in social change
have found AI to be a method that easily accommodates a variety
of participant views and brings people together across differences.
School Re-Form
What happens when we enter a school system asking, “what
gives life to this system?” Within AI Consulting, there are
a number of specialists with powerful stories about transforming
schools and education redesign – especially when parents,
students, teachers, administrators, and the community are all in
the room.
International
Development
AI Consulting has a rich history in the International Development
community. Save the Children, World Vision, The Mountain Institute
– were some of the first global applications of AI They have
their roots in the Global Excellence in Management (GEM) Initiative
an AI capacity building program for non-governmental organizations
that has involved over 500 alumni working in international development
projects all over the world.
Leadership
Services
Leadership
Development
The appreciative leader sets direction, communicates
for alignment and inspires people to break new ground based on the
strengths, capacities, and untapped potential that exist within
the organization. By learning to ask thought-provoking questions
while sharing stories that demonstrate the positive potential of
an organization, the appreciative leader realizes and unleashes,
not only their own, but other people’s genius.
Success
Stories
Executive
Coaching
One of the most important aspects of any change initiative
is making sure that key leaders throughout the organization have
the help they need to develop their self awareness, interpersonal
intelligence, and communication skills. AI provides such a framework.
Life/Career
Coaching
During life or career transitions we make pivotal
decisions in the midst of heightened vulnerability. By focusing
on strengths, appreciative coaching builds pride and energy. It
also propels positive action by bringing forward the best of the
past and exploring the optimal fit between clients’ talents
and life purposes.
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