Appreciative Inquiry Community Visioning: Vision St. Louis Park
Bridget Gothberg , Martha McDonell , Will S. Stockton , Marjorie B. Herdes , Tom Harmening
City of St. Louis Park/ Mobius Inc.
St.Louis Park, MN United States
2005, Oct 26
Annotation: Time to Revisit Visioning
The community vision is now over 10 years old. It’s time now for our leaders to go back and listen to our citizens as a way to garner additional direction. With many of the recommendations from the first vision addressed, more input is needed to guide specific action as our city changes and moves forward. If we are to continue to progress and not merely age, we can’t go back and repeat the same process. We can’t ask the same questions “What’s wrong?” “What can we fix?” For our next stage of visioning we need to advance to the next level.
Rather than utilize the standard approach of soliciting a list of deficits and asking for solutions, we propose to engage in an entirely new kind of visioning process called “appreciative inquiry.”
Appreciative Inquiry Approach
Appreciative inquiry begins with the assumption that the community is in a good place and seeks information to move toward an even better place. This new approach may become a model for other communities that have matured beyond their initial visioning process.
We plan to expand our 10 year-old community vision by involving hundreds of community residents in an appreciative inquiry that will lead to new proposals to improve our community’s quality of life. This new, interdisciplinary approach to community visioning will be a process that other communities can replicate.
Human systems grow toward what they ask questions about. Appreciative Inquiry is a process that brings into view the factors that give life to a living system and articulates the possibilities that will lead to the development of the future all participants envision. It is more than a method or technique: it compels participants to inquire more deeply into the depth and breadth of the community and co-create their future. A traditional problem solving approach assumes that a community is problem to be solved. An appreciative inquiry approach assumes a community has strengths to build on to envision and create a future that is more than a response to current problems.
Project Design for 2005
The strategy for this project, outlined in three phases, is to initiate an appreciative inquiry with current City leadership and expand participation, step by step, to include all key stakeholder voices. Each conversation will build on the results created by previous participants to create an expanding vision that identifies common ground for action. Participating stakeholders will include many who are not residents but who work in the City and contribute to its vitality. A critical element of the strategy is to involve children from the community, in partnership with an adult, as interviewers in the inquiry. The first two phases outline the process by which participation will be facilitated to include thousands of stakeholders in this inquiry. The third phase describes the way in which common ground will be articulated, communicated and formulated into actionable goals that expand, and build on, the existing vision.
Online Resources:
Vision St. Louis Park
City of St.Louis Park
Resource Files:
Appreciative Inquiry Community Visioning (doc )
History of SLP Vision Process (doc )
Vision Interview package (pdf )
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