Practice deep respect for people and local solutions with Liberating Structures - Appreciative Interviews

How it used to go

The team he was working with was stuck in a familiar pattern.
Meetings started with problems. What wasn’t working. What needed improvement. What was missing.
The conversations were well-intentioned but predictable. Someone would describe a bottleneck. Others would nod. Then the search for solutions would begin—often outside the team itself.

“Maybe we need a new process.”
“Perhaps we should bring in an expert.”
“What if we implement a new tool?”

The attention was always directed outward. Toward what still needed to come. What still needed to be fixed.
What people were already doing to keep the work working barely came up. The small solutions. The smart coordination. The informal routines that kept daily work running.
Not because they weren’t there, but because the conversation didn’t ask for them.

The pattern was recognizable: first make the problem big, then search for a solution from outside. Employees increasingly responded with a sighing remark:

“Yes, but that’s not how it works here.”

Not as resistance. As realism.
The system constantly spoke about people but rarely with them.

A new structure

He decided to open the conversation differently. Not by denying problems, but by temporarily setting them aside.

“Let’s start with what already works,” he suggested.
“Not perfect. Not grand. Just real.”

With Appreciative Interviews, he invited people to interview each other in pairs. He wrote down the first question:

“Can you describe a moment when this work, despite everything, went well?”

Then followed deepening questions:

• What made this moment possible?
• What did you do yourself?
• What made the difference here?

The tone in the room changed immediately. People spoke more slowly. More personally. Not analyzing, but telling stories.

After the interviews, he combined two pairs into groups of four. In these small groups, participants shared the other person’s success story, not their own. And they added a focus question:

“What made this a success—and what pattern do we see in this?”

Something important happened here. Stories were lifted out of their individual context and transformed into shared insights. Not as conclusions, but as recognizable elements: ways of working together, small choices, moments of attention.

Only then did the group come back together.
What became visible surprised no one—and yet everyone.
The solutions that had been searched for so often already existed. Scattered. Unnamed. Unappreciated.

What was liberated

The first thing that was freed was recognition.
What was previously seen as “just how we do it” suddenly had language. People heard their own actions reflected in others’ stories. That gave weight to what was previously invisible.

The conversations changed in tone. Less heavy. Less defensive. Not because problems disappeared, but because people felt seen as carriers of what works.

The relationships also shifted. Because people told each other’s stories, equality emerged. Not everyone knew everything, but everyone knew something that mattered.

What first sounded like reluctance became curiosity.

“We do this too.”
“Maybe we can do more of this.”

Space emerged. Not euphoria, but movement.

What shifted

After this first session, it didn’t stop at looking back.
In follow-up sessions, Troika Consulting was added. People helped each other in groups of three with the question:

“How can we do more of what already works?”

The group learned to first look at what is already present, what is already going well, and how to do more of that together. How can you strengthen it without formalizing it or over-regulating it?

Then he used 1-2-4-All to let insights land. First individually: what are you taking away from this?

Then in small groups and only then together: what do we see as a collective pattern?
Slowly something new became visible. Not only in conversations, but in behavior.
Teams began to refer to previous success stories themselves.

“This is similar to what worked then.”
“Shall we approach it the way we did then?”

Appreciative Interviews were no longer a separate intervention, but a way of looking. Problems didn’t disappear, but were more often approached from what was already present and what was already possible.

The culture shifted subtly but noticeably: from problem-focused improvement to building on what people can already do and are already doing.