Hey Librarians!  Thank you for tuning in for this episode of the podcast. It means so much to me that you’re listening. You can find complete show notes for today’s episode at masterfullibrarian.com/ep-13.

In my episode, Eight Proven Ways to Motivate and Inspire Your Library Team, I talked about asking your employees for their ideas and really listening to them.  If you haven’t listened to that episode, you can find it and download it at masterfullibrarian.com/ep-9. You can also find the podcast on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.

But I know many of you are saying to yourselves something like “I ask my staff for input all the time, but almost no one volunteers ideas.” Or you might be thinking that your staff has given lots of feedback about what needed to be changed or made better, but you’ve gotten nowhere with solutions. 

Today, I have a solution for you – ask better questions.

If you’ve ever been involved with a strategic planning process, and I’m sure you have,  you know that you frequently begin with a SWOT analysis.  If you’re not familiar with that acronym, it stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Obstacles, and Threats. In this process, you assess these four aspects of your library or organization.

But here’s the problem with that tool – you probably already all have a really good idea of what those things are. Especially the obstacles and threats.  You and your staff are very familiar with your challenges and may talk and think about them a lot. And I’m willing to guess that many, if not most, of them haven’t been overcome or neutralized.

The solution – ask more powerful questions.

Powerful framing questions don’t have straight forward answers.  They’re open-ended and meaningful. They could be called adaptive questions because they evolve and change and grow as you discuss them. 

They can’t be answered with a simple solution.  They require creativity and insight. 

Asking these powerful framing questions is called Appreciative Inquiry. The process was developed by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, two professors at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in the 1980’s. 

Cooperrider recognized that “people move in the direction of their conversations”.  

What that means for you is that problem-centered questions, such as “Why aren’t more teens attending our programs?”  or “Why won’t the Language Arts teachers collaborate with library staff?” keep a group stuck in the problem.  They don’t invite fresh viewpoints and creative thinking.

What Appreciate Inquiry – and appreciative questions do – is to lead us into considering opportunities. 

In their book, Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership, Ed Morrison and his co-authors from the Purdue Agile Strategy Lab say that “If we focus on opportunities, we make sure that we do not fall into the every deepening chasm fo problem analysis.  We have the opportunity to think instead about possible alternatives.”

When engaging your staff in an effort to address library challenges and develop innovative and engaging strategies, powerful open-ended framing, or appreciative, questions are your most effective tool.

For complete show notes, visit masterfullibrarian.com/ep-13