So I just finished reading the “Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry” and I have to say that I’m still trying to figure it all out. One thing that the book makes clear is that focusing on problems can be a very negative pursuit. This resonated for me because some of the feedback I had received regarding my “Impediment Hunting” presentation had been along the lines of, “This is kind of negative material.”
Now honestly, that feedback had caught me by surprise. I didn’t really see looking for impediments as something that was really positive or negative. Obviously some people do though. And after reading about Appreciative Inquiry, I started to think about the negative character of impediments more and more. Now I’m not sure that finding impediments has to be a purely negative pursuit – but it raised an intriguing idea – What if instead of asking the traditional three questions in scrum:
- What did I do yesterday?
- What am I going to do today?
- Any Impediments blocking my progress?
instead we could turn the three questions on their head this way:
- What did I do yesterday?
- What am I going to do today?
- What one thing helped accelerate my progress yesterday?
It’s a fun idea. I’m going to have to give it a try. It would be fun to collect a list of all of my “accelerators” rather than all of my blocking issues. That’s a list I would want to share with others!
Posted by Tom Perry 
