Appreciative Inquiry and the Art of Interviewing

Presentation Abstract

Most things that we do, professionally and personally, require us to obtain information and cooperation from the people around us. One of the keys to getting the information or cooperation is the ability to ask the right questions and to analyze the current situation in light of where you want to be. This interactive workshop will discuss principles of appreciative inquiry and provide a safe place to practice these skills.

What can attendees expect to learn?

Gervase Bushe describes appreciative inquiry as a technique that “advocates collective inquiry into the best of what is, in order to imagine what could be, followed by collective design of a desired future state that is compelling and thus, does not require the use of incentives, coercion or persuasion for planned change to occur.”

The questions we ask and the way we ask them tend to focus us in a particular direction. This method focuses on using what is positive and strong in the present state to envision what is possible in the future.

When we engage in appreciative inquiry, we can often get better information from the other person and design better solutions, while improving team engagement.

Meet the Presenter

Katherine (Kit) Brown-Hoekstra is an STC Fellow and former STC Society President, certified trainer for the STC Certified Professional Technical Communicator (CPTC) program, and a member of the Colorado State University Media Hall of Fame for the Dept. of Journalism. She is an experienced consultant with over 25 years of experience in technical communication, much of it working with life sciences companies and localization teams. As Principal of Comgenesis, LLC, Kit provides consulting and training to her clients on a variety of topics, including localization, content strategy, and content management. She speaks at conferences worldwide and publishes regularly in industry magazines. She is currently editing The Language of Localization for the Content Wrangler and XML Press. Her blog is www.pangaeapapers.com.

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