Want to work on changing things? Want to learn about your team and listen better? Interested in a pretty good pathway to do that?

Appreciative Inquiry is process of:

In this podcast, we’re gonna walk through Appreciative Inquiry and Theory U and how these 2 organizational development processes meld together to create a powerful tool for listening to and helping to improve the work your team does. It’s so good!

Our CRNA team at Maine Medical Center worked through this process – really, we’re still working through it – this spring. The full story is in the podcast.

I made a video for this podcast but I haven’t been able to get it loaded to YouTube yet and apparently, it’s too big for this website. In the meantime, you can see the core show notes to the podcast in the PDF below. There’s photos of the Theory U and our list of 10-questions we developed as our Appreciative Inquiry survey we used at Maine Medical Center.

I hope this episode gives you some very practical tools for how to engage with your team better. I’ve found appreciative inquiry to be a great way to have a conversation with groups and find a new way forward. Let me know how it goes for you!

References

Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. John Wiley & Sons. 

Hollnagel, E. (2020). Synesis: the unification of productivity, quality, safety and reliability. Routledge. 

Scharmer, O. (2016). Theory U: Leading from the future as it emerges. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Scharmer, O. (2025). Theory U process of co-sensing and co-creating.  Presencing Institute. https://www.presencing.org

Whitney, D., & Cooperrider, D. (2005). Appreciative inquiry: A positive revolution in change. Berret-Koehler Publishers.