Appreciative inquiry is a powerful tool for developing a new strategy:

• It builds an organisation-wide conversation that identifies existing strengths
• It generates a vision of how to make the most of those strengths
• It creates optimism around the new strategy, fuelling the organisation with energy.

Most importantly:

It enables organisations to choose what to focus on.

Over the last year Kate Harrison and I have been using Appreciative Inquiry to help non-profit organisations develop new strategies.

Developing a new strategy is exciting for an organisation because it helps it to understand what its best work is. Simultaneously, strategy development creates the time to look beyond the organisation’s existing work, and to think about where it should focus its efforts to respond to what society needs.

Organisational dilemmas

A key moment in developing a new strategy is deciding what to do and what not to do. As Michael Porter said:

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

Appreciative inquiry helps to surface the dilemmas which the organisation has been grappling with. It does this by identifying organisational strengths and possible future visions. We are then able to draw out the organisational dilemmas.  For example, a common dilemma is geographical focus. For an international NGO, this dilemma might be to expand into new countries or work in fewer. For a funding organisation the dilemma might be to broaden its funding to more recipients or to restrict it.

Diagram 1. Examples of organisational dilemma.