Clarity about what we want can also lead us to rethink the very nature of the social causes we support.
Imagine this scene: A researcher watches as a five-year-old girl draws a picture of her extended family. The girl grabs bright-colored crayons and carefully draws her smiling parents, brother, and sister in the middle of the paper. Then she reaches for dark gray to sketch her grandparents, smaller and off to the side.
Theresa Bertram got wind of this research and thought about what it meant to her: As young as five, we've begun to hold images of diminishing as we grow older.
Theresa is executive director of the Cathedral Foundation, a service arm of the Episcopal Diocese of Jacksonville, Florida. The Foundation had earned a national reputation for its services to senior citizens, including retirement communities and Meals on Wheels.
Still, Theresa wasn't satisfied.
"We'd built our services based on what was best for seniors, as we saw it," says Theresa. "We were responding to external factors--medical problems, isolation, lack of engagement. And we were focusing on programs for which funding was available."
"This was under the banner of restoring independence," Theresa continues. "But it occurred to me that when we deliver meals to people at home, or care for them in retirement communities, we might actually create or perpetuate isolation and dependence. We might inadvertently preempt a different response from their families, their neighborhoods, or the community."
Theresa began to wonder what could happen if the Foundation stopped focusing solely on meeting what many consider the needs of seniors: meals and custodial care. She began to reflect on whether the Foundation might make an even more significant contribution to society.
Theresa engaged Kathy Wells, a local consultant who had studied the processes upon which this book is based, to conduct an assessment of the Foundation. (Kathy, you may recall, was asking questions in Jacksonville about civic cooperation at the time her colleague was looking for heartburn issues.) When she first started to work with Kathy, Theresa saw the assessment as the first step in a conventional strategic planning process.
"But I was struck by the transformational language in Kathy's report," says Theresa. "She talked about tapping our latent energy and dreaming about possibilities, rather than beginning with a plan."
The following month, the board decided to start on the path Kathy had shown them: finding the Foundation's future--its best future--using the methods of appreciative inquiry. In a memo to board members, chairman John Sefton called it "a bold step that requires vision and faith in ourselves."
It was an especially bold move because the inquiry would not focus on the Cathedral Foundation and its programs, how much money it could raise, or even on the needs of the Jacksonville community. Instead, it would explore the larger question of aging in American society.
Cathedral Foundation would convene a conversation about the best that aging could be.
"An interview protocol was designed to evoke the best experiences of older people--and younger people in the presence of their elders--and to find out what conditions made those experiences possible," says Theresa. "What we find will let us develop a vision of our organization's future, based on how we can create the best possible circumstances for the people we serve," Theresa continues. "In the end, what we learn from this process will make it possible to reframe the whole discussion about aging, and begin to create a new set of social expectations."