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Dealing with Difficult People
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Building Big Goals
A Case Study from World Vision| posted 10/24/2007
World Vision exists to fulfill the mission of "a vision for each child, a life in all its fullness, a prayer for every heart, the will to make it so." They employ over 22,000 employees around the world, and have been engaged in the task of making this vision a reality for over 55 years. Several years back, after a period of rapid growth in terms of world disasters, and a resultant growth of funds and employees, World Vision engaged in a process of "Big Goaling" to flesh out strategic ways to make their vision a reality. The vision process had taken 2 years of intensive work at World Vision, but they gave themselves only one year to take their vision statement and flesh it out into a statement of goals and strategic objectives. They gave themselves the added challenge of soliciting input from every employee.
World Vision implemented some very creative strategies to garner input from everyone in their organization. First, they solicited input from five events: a conference of 100 directors in Toronto and four regional director's conferences, each with 100 senior-level people. In addition, 20 people, representing each of World Vision's key constituents, were placed on a Strategic Planning Advisory Group. Next, they formulated a virtual conference space with a firm called iCohere, which enabled 14,000 computer users (in different languages) to provide input. Finally, children's groups were formed in 14 countries. The children were interviewed in focus groups, and drew pictures illustrating what the world would look like if they could paint it the way they would like to see it. The final stage in the big goal process for World Vision took place at a summit in Bangkok, with 130 key leaders.
The approach World Vision used, with the help of consultants from Case Western, is called appreciative inquiry. Essentially, it is a strength-based assessment of the organization's greatest capacities and assets in order to create the foundation for an ideal future. What is unique about this approach is that you first mine the successes of the past, and then focus only on strengths and opportunities—not weaknesses or threats. The idea is to create and exploit those features that already give life to your greatest moments, your greatest work, and align those processes, behaviors, and technologies with a greater future. This process allows people to follow their energy and work for the ideas that attract them most.
One of the ideas behind appreciative inquiry is that all organizations go in the direction of what we most frequently talk and ask questions about. Conversations create behaviors. So change begins with the questions we ask—whether we lead with questions about the problems someone is facing, or with questions about what is working well. We use the statement, "what you study, grows." By that we mean that we decide what to study, and that choice creates the reality. If you study low morale, you will learn about all the factors that contribute to it … but you won't learn about high enthusiasm. When you learn about how to reduce costs, you don't learn about growth. In the same way, if you can get your stakeholders to share a positive anticipatory image, they cannot help but move toward it. So appreciative inquiry begins with an image of a preferred future, and then talks about that in various ways until it begins to be a reality.
