Module 2.

2 Unintended Consequences of
Deficit Discourse
[MUSIC] The other thing we see is what we call the unintended consequence of constantly
engaging in and talking to each other about solving problems. Now let me underscore, these are
the unintended consequences. This isn't the result of a certain leadership style, this is not the
result of a certain attitude of a leader or a power hungry autocrat or something like that. This
happens in situations where everybody's well intended, everybody comes to work feeling
responsible to solve a problem or to move a problem through a problem solving process in their
system. But if you do this over and over and you talk the language of problem solving to each
other, you begin to see some of these things surface and I dare say. Most of us can see one or
more of these going on in our organizations and my university today. So I am not going to go
through all of them. I just want to hit on a few of them. The spiral of deficit vocabularies.
Organizations move in the direction of what they most frequently talk about. So if we have at
our availability, our vocabulary is heavily deficit oriented than, like it or not we're going to
move in that direction. And it does have an exhausting, fatiguing consequence to it. Look in the
field of medicine, for example. We have these international diagnostic code manuals. I think the
current edition is over 11,000 different definitions. Complete with diagnoses and treatment of
things that can be wrong with us. If you track the number of codes in the previous editions, you
see a exponential curve and the next edition is predicted to have over 25,000. From 11,000 now
to 25,000 different codes. Now there's nothing wrong with these codes, they're very useful.
They help our physicians take care of us when we're sick and ailing. But what would you
describe as the trend in vocabulary about human goodness? Things that are good and positive
about humans? I doubt there is any evidence that it is exponential. Maybe there's a growth.
Terms like wellness, for example, are relatively new, maybe two and a half decades old. So
there are examples of increase in vocabularies about good, positive aspects of humans. But it
flies in the face of a huge trend in deficit language. We found the same thing in the field of
psychology, the science of studying people. In one study with their most renowned research
journal, they found that they had published over 40,000 articles on human anxiety and
dysfunction. Stress, anxiety and dysfunction. That same journal had published less than 400
articles over its entire existence on human hope, joy, or well-being. Now the researcher might
say, well we're just describing the human condition. But if the human condition is 100 times
more stress, anxiety, and deficit driven than it is positive, hope, well-being. That doesn't quite
fit, I think, even our worse days, in terms of how we experience life. So there is this trend, or
this force where we find ourselves trying to work with each other, each with the good intention.
But having at our access heavily deficit oriented language to work around. Let me jump down
to the bottom one on this list. The SWOT shortcut. I'm assuming that a number of you, most of
you, would be familiar with SWOT. It's a tool for analyzing situations, particularly useful in
strategic thinking and planning. S for strengths, W for weaknesses, O for opportunities, T for
threat. And it's a nice two by two display, where you can assess the situation that your team or
your organization faces. When you use this tool with executive groups, I've done it for years.
Probably over 50, closer to 100 groups in my experience. What you see is initially people are
very energetic. They're happy to fill out each area. Here are all the strengths we see. Here are all
the weakness. Here are all the opportunities. Here are all the threats. Then you take a coffee
break, or there's a shift in the meeting and it's time to go work. It's time to go dig in and figure
out, well, what sense do we make of either the strengths or the weaknesses, or the opportunities
or the threats. And then how is that going to lead us to action? And what you see at that point is
a very, very consistent tendency. The group wants to move to the weaknesses and threats.
There's nothing in the tool that says you should start there. There's nothing in the tool that says
that that's a better place to go or that's more important. But that's where the teams want to go. It
says if they're all carrying a invisible ink on their business card which says, I get paid to
manage weaknesses and prevent threats. So it's just a different example of, these are all well-
intentioned people. It's not about their style or anything like that. It's not about their optimism,
pessimism ratings. It's just this learned tendency we have to look at what's broken, to look at
what needs to be fixed. And the people who have studied these unintended consequences see
that this is a direct cause of fatigue, wanting to be left alone, less orientation to approach others,
less orientation to ask for help and to give help. Less of a belief the next time the leader comes
and says you know we've got a very, very urgent situation that we have to deal with. It just
wears you down over time. So we see that there's a deficit approach to management of change
which is a dominant approach. And it's heavily influenced by what we have learned as our basic
problem solving language, problem solving steps. What appreciative inquiry tries to do is to
give us a different approach, a different tool. Not better than but different so we can add it to
our repertoire. So that if we feel like a change is losing momentum, or we feel like we're stuck
in our project or in our teamwork, then this is something we can turn to. And you can see that
the language is intentionally different. Instead of identifying the problem root cause analysis,
finding what went wrong as the starting point. In appreciative inquiry we start with let's search
for when it went right, when it went its best, and what caused that. Then we imagine what could
be, we design into that, how do we get into that image of the future we most want. And then we
implement, we create new changes and new initiatives. If you do the deficit well and you do it
often, you actually begin to live out a metaphor. You live out a reality in your team or your
workplace. That organizations are by definitions problems to be solved. And, I think all of us
would say, well on any given day, that's true. I feel like that sometimes in my academic
department, and I know you probably feel that way in your team or your workplace. So this isn't
about right and wrong, it's about the consequence of living and interacting with this language
and this approach. So on the one hand with the deficient orientation we kind of live out the
reality that organizations are problems to be solved. On the appreciative inquiry side were
really living out a metaphor that organizations are these complex webs or relationships with
infinite possibilities. Now again, sometimes I met my work and I feel that. I see that, I see that
as very true. So again we're not this isn't right and wrong. One's bad, one's good. One's true,
one's not true. There is many ways, many metaphors we could use to describe our organizations
at any given moment. The point I'm making here is that what we experience is the consequence
of how we interact with each other. And literally the kinds of language questions, words that we
use with each other. There's not something out there that we're reacting to that makes it a
problem, or a relationship with infinite possibilities. We choose to live into those and many
others like them, we choose that through the language and the questions that we ask. So what
does this all have to do with change? Let me try to bring it down to tips again for the
practitioner. From the approach of appreciative inquiry, if you want to change something, you
start by changing the way you talk about it. So in one case, you may be talking about it in a
deficit way. What's the gap? At what rate are we reducing the gap? What's the cause of the
problem? Have we looked at all the different possible causes and so forth. You could be
wrapped up in that deficit language. If you want to change the momentum of that project, if you
want to change the energy of that project, if you want to change the commitment people have to
that project. One way to begin is to simply change the way you're talking about it because
human systems move in the direction of what we most frequently talk and ask questions about.
And so the real key then is this last line your questions become fateful. When I ask a question I
pretend or I imagine it's neutral. But in fact the questions are guiding the conversation or they're
affecting the conversation. And the conversations are actually steering where we're headed. So
if we want to change the direction or the pace or the trajectory of where we're headed, the very
very starting point is change the way you're talking about that issue. So appreciative leaders
often shift the conversation with intentional questions that place curiosity and value on when
things are going right. So find a time when you're in the midst of a discussion about something
gone wrong and just experiment. When is the last time this went correctly or great? And what
enabled that to happen. See what you learn from simply shifting the question toward assuming
there's something where it's gone right, or where the problem has not occurred and what
allowed that to happen. That actually starts the change process. [MUSIC]