Appreciative Inquiry - Starting a Thousand Fires at Hull City Council - United Kingdom

Appreciative Inquiry - Starting a thousand fires at Hull City Council - United Kingdom

Hull City Council is a large, unitary local authority in the north-east of England. It has had an integrated transformation or improvement programme for a number of years, beginning during an intervention by the government into the affairs of the Council several years ago. The Council has improved tremendously since that point in its history and it is now one of the better performing upper tier Councils.

In late-2008 officers of the Council, who our company Optimum Interventions Ltd (Oi) had previously worked with at the time of our involvement in the government intervention, approached us to talk about adding further impetus and engagement to the Council’s transformation programme. Whilst the Council was relatively satisfied that its programme was comprehensive, reasonably well funded and integrated with other strategic activities, there was a developing sense that it might benefit from a certain...something. That ‘something’ wasn’t clear, but with committed and passionate people leading the programme, with all of the necessary programme-management methods in place, there was a feeling that even more might be achieved, particularly in the human-resource related element of the programme, known as Creating Conditions for Success (CCfS). This programme’s main focus was to establish and promote the values and behaviours across the Council which will help it to achieve its aim of improving the lives of Hull residents.

In a telephone conference in September with officers from the CCfS project we discussed what approaches could develop greater engagement with and energy around CCfS. We discussed with them our experience of working on a range of public sector transformation efforts, two of which are reported here on the AI Commons’ ‘Stories from the Field’, i.e. Walsall Council and West Midlands Fire Service. Whilst not in any way suggesting they simply took a template approach to using AI, we shared our experience that AI can deliver potentially great benefits to (already effective) change efforts; ones where greater involvement and engagement is needed and participants from around the ‘system’ might have a good deal to offer the overall change effort.

In that context we agreed to provide some ideas and suggestions for how AI could be used, and one aspect of AI that really took hold in the conversation was the notion of a ‘summit’ event to provide a magnetic focus to the work of change over the coming months.

The Council invited us to a meeting of the planning group for CCfS in October at which the Council’s Chief Executive (Kim Ryley) also attended to share his overall view of the position of his Council and how he really wanted a “thousand fires” around the transformation effort. That imagery was particularly helpful to us in describing both the required impact of and contribution to be made by appreciative methods in change efforts. It was a phrase repeated often in the ensuing months.

One of the features of our conversations with the planning group was the potential that AI offers in the creation of a vision or over-arching statement of purpose for an organisation or partnership. In Hull’s case though we were looking to use AI at a level below that of an overall vision (Hull City Council had a strong and appreciative vision already in place), and more around developing the values and behaviours to help people deliver the vision, which was the prime point of focus for the CCfS project.

The CCfS project, with the support of the Council’s corporate strategic team, had determined that whilst the existing corporate values and behaviours had served their purpose well, the time was right to generate new ones and involve much larger numbers of people in their creation. The project lead put it this way, “it’s about encouraging all employees to commit to the values and live them day to day”.

We agreed to work closely together towards this aim, starting almost immediately with Oi providing some AI background knowledge and learning, and then being asked to run an initial series of AI workshops, with thoughts already forming towards an overall goal being a summit in mid-2009.

The initial AI workshops were particularly interesting because whilst introducing AI in a relatively brief fashion to over 60 managers who were variously from the Council’s leadership programme (‘RESULTS’ programme) and facilitators of change in their services, we used the events in ‘live’ mode, i.e. to both introduce AI and create material for the CCfS project. We posited the workshops firmly in the Discovery step of AI to enable participants to generate meaningful outputs from the workshops to underpin the more detailed work to follow across the Council.

After brief overviews of AI, we worked together through the Define and Discovery steps, in some detail and using the well established ‘base’ appreciative questions quoted widely in AI literature, and adapted to the Hull context. Gradually we located the themes and topics from the stories of Hull CC working at its best, and these would then guide the creation of the questions for appreciative conversations across the Council later on. This was ‘live’ Discovery at work. It was also preparation for yet more discoveries at an intimate level in appreciative conversations to come later.

The workshops were completed in an intensive one week period early in 2009 and the output collated by a small number of event participants and colleagues from the CCfS planning group. We then ran a fourth workshop, where in ‘real-time’ our sub-group synthesised all of the workshop outputs into six key themes relating to Hull CC, as an employer, a place to work, the customers, its contribution to the city’s success and so on.

We created a lead question and subsidiary questions for each of the themes. These subsidiary questions had been developed in the workshops and as ‘raw’ material were perfect for the subgroup to develop into the final stage of a ‘conversation master’ guide. After this final workshop, a little further refining was done by one of the subgroup, but nothing more than alterations at the margin to hold true to the ‘live’ work of the earlier AI workshop participants.

The conversation master then went into the wider Council. The Council holds regular large-scale events for managers and non-managers to engage with, consult and inform. The CCfS planning group had wanted to use these events to feed the AI work into the whole-system as part of helping to create new approaches in how the Council engages with its employees. The opportunity was thus taken by participants from the AI workshops to facilitate hundreds of appreciative conversations in these events using the conversation master.

In general terms the master guides Oi designs with clients have sections for proper introductions, explanation of key themes, lead and follow-up questions and space for interviewers to record brief notes, highlights, quotes and examples in a consistent manner. Innovatively, the Council had also arranged for a database to be created that allowed all interviewers to electronically capture the essence of the conversations and load them in to the database. This would ease the subsequent synthesis of the conversations into workable material and for any later summit.

By the late spring of 2009 there had been literally hundreds of AI conversations across the Council; both in large-scale events and in more intimate settings. These represented a significant commitment to AI and the belief in its potential to increase the pace of change. As well as its use in the large-scale corporate events, the conversation master had been offered to the participants of the workshops to use in conversations outside of those large-scale corporate events. Those conversations extended the reach of AI into Council services, where in some instances it was seen to have the potential to develop their own approaches to change within the Council’s overall transformation effort.

The database records of the conversations were then brought together by a small sub-group of the CCfS planning group. The massive amount of material, e.g. key words, notable phrases and ‘quotable quotes’ particularly those relating to the values and behaviours central to excellent performance, were gathered and grouped to help to understand the ‘best of what is’ across the Council. This collated material was seen as central to informing the Discover and Design phases of the planned summit, which by then had been agreed by the Council’s leadership team and scheduled to be held in little over a month of this synthesising work. The reader will note the pace of the work being pursued by Hull, and the evidence this provides of AI’s contribution to quickening the pace of change through its energising properties.

An extended meeting of the planning group in early May then reviewed progress on the project, the synthesised output from the conversations, other aspects of transformation and began to plan for the summit event. This was quite an intensive meeting. We faced many challenges, e.g. to use AI ‘appropriately’ for the summit at the same time as achieving a pre-determined general outcome, i.e. a set of new values and behaviours; to bring forward the material gathered so far from the conversations and at the same time provide the summit participants from all levels and locations within the Council, with sufficient space to Discover, Dream, Design and create a Destiny for themselves; and to use AI not to create a vision for the organisation as might be a more ‘usual’ use for it, but to provide the more detailed values and behaviours to help deliver that vision. That said, the meeting produced a very workable summit programme and we took that away to create a suite of draft documents: a detailed event programme and leader guide, a sub-group facilitator guide and a participant workbook, all specific to the Hull context.

At this point our Council colleagues went into overdrive on creating the summit – the venue was to be the city’s iconic ‘Kingston Communications Stadium’, where the city’s Premier League football team and Premiership Rugby League team are based. A large suite was booked and the planning group with colleagues from the Council’s events team subsequently visited the suite to ‘walk through’ the event and test out both process and practical aspects. Our role as external advisers was now to support and guide our client officer colleagues in their efforts – ‘ownership’ was most definitely theirs.

In the final few days before the summit the myriad detail of creating a superb event of high quality and meaning was worked through by the team. Invitations to 200 participants and confirmations were in hand and the Council’s Chief Executive and other directors confirmed their attendance. The planning team finalised the event materials, guides and workbooks and visited the event venue on the Sunday evening before the Monday summit to put out the existing Discovery material on display boards and delineate the four D’s as distinct sections of the suite.

Everything was ready for the summit; first mentioned in September 2008 during the first conference call between the officers and Oi Ltd and now a practical reality.

A separate piece describing the event in detail will shortly be produced and published by the Council’s Communication’s team, who ably supported the AI work and more widely the Council’s transformation effort throughout. A link will be published to that document within this report in due course. Suffice it to say for now that there were many highlights of the summit. As observer and participant I saw:

• The Council’s Head of Workforce Strategy lead the event, ensuring that whilst Oi Ltd had supported the whole AI effort, the main figure for the event was a well known Council officer
• The sub-group facilitators, who by and large had attended the early Discovery workshops, ably guided table-groups through the event, producing strong Discovery conversations and vivid Dreams of the Council as its vision is realised - and much humour as well!
• The material brought forward from the earlier appreciative conversations was properly respected and fully integrated with the summit Discovery stage outputs by the CCfS sub-group
• Voting used well by the participants to indicate their preferred values from amongst all of the collated Discovery material, with five rich draft values distilled from the material and clear favourites with participants (see the Council story for more on these)
• The values adopted by the Summit – and thus automatically by the Council’s leadership team in the shape of the Chief Executive in an afternoon session of the Summit. This act of faith in the summit output was a key feature of our earlier thinking and planning and shows huge trust by the leadership team in their employees and the process
• The Design step deliver challenging provocative propositions for the new values and their associated behaviours
• And Destiny not missed out, with offers and commitments to continue to create the final value statements, associated behaviours and actions to inculcate them into daily organisational life being made freely. These are already being followed-up with actions by the CCfS project group with other colleagues

Subsequent to the Summit, I facilitated two further full-day AI workshops where many of the table- facilitators from the Summit and other colleagues met to work through some of the more detailed science, theory and practice of AI to enhance their knowledge and thoughts about its application. These colleagues will be some of the champions of AI in the continuing transformation effort.

So, this brings us to the end of the beginning for Hull City Council’s initial introduction to and use of Appreciative Inquiry to add pace, engagement and “a thousand fires” to its transformation programme. We have been honoured to support the Council in its goal and continue to help it to develop its thinking around the deep value that AI can bring to sustainable change.

Steve Loraine

July 2008

For more information please contact Steve Loraine at or visit