I didn’t know what to expect when I entered the room full of people ready to learn the basics of appreciative inquiry. A leadership and communication model that accentuates the positive at all times, the system as it was described by facilitator Ann Perodeau seemed a good fit for some of the groups represented in the room — the Jasper Community Team, Adult Learning, even the Municipality of Jasper. I had intended to merely observe, keeping a cautious distance between myself and the ostensible subjects of my story, but Perodeau would have none of it. Before I knew it, I was participating in the exercises and finding that the process seemed to have more than a little resonance for the work I do as a reporter.

Always focusing on the positive might work to boost morale and improve results in a car dealership, to borrow an illustrative example from the facilitator, but could it really be applied to the pursuit of a story? Think of press scrums, or those documentary films where the intrepid interviewer chases a reluctant story source down a flight of stairs, shouting questions at a rapidly disappearing posterior. Would it work to start off a question and answer session of that nature by asking “what is it that you do well, and how can you do more of it?”

Maybe not, but leaving the training room after two hours of grasping at the barest fundamentals of appreciative inquiry, I decide to try it out. The next interview I did, I would focus on the positive.

As luck would have it, my opportunity to test the approach stood less than 100 feet away. Kirby Smith, a wildlife biologist who had organized the major caribou conference that came to Jasper last week was packing up his own meeting room just down the hallway. Granted a couple of moments of his time, I proceeded to query him on the successes of the conference and what kind of an impact he felt it might make. Had I not been exposed to the concept of appreciative inquiry just moments before, I would have been sorely tempted to ask a pointed question on the relationship between a scientific conference and industrial sponsors. 

I nearly dropped my notepad when Smith, unprompted, began discussing the issue. All in all, the interview was one of the more revealing and pleasant in my recent memory. Faced with an interviewer who wanted to hear only the good news, Smith opened up and shared his point of view on a number of contentious topics I had been resigned to finding another source to speak on.

Does this mean that every interview from now on will be done in appreciative format? Not likely. People with media training or experience would likely take advantage of that approach to offer unadulterated spin. But I’ve seen that appreciative inquiry can take people to places you (and they) might not expect.