#120 – Appreciative Inquiry (how to listen to your team)

#120 – Appreciative Inquiry (how to listen to your team)

From Anesthesia Guidebook by Jon Lowrance

May 2, 2025 · 34 min

About this episode

This episode explores Appreciative Inquiry and Theory U as tools for improving team communication and engagement.

Want to work on changing things? Want to learn about your team and listen better? Interested in a pretty good pathway to do that? Appreciative Inquiry is process of: Discovering what’s working well Dreaming about what could be Designing for future change & success Realizing the Destiny that this process will bring about In this podcast, we’re gonna walk through Appreciative Inquiry and Theory U and how these 2 organizational development processes meld together to create a powerful tool for listening to and helping to improve the work your team does. It’s so good! Our CRNA team at Maine Medical Center worked through this process – really, we’re still working through it – this spring. The full story is in the podcast. I made a video for this podcast but I haven’t been able to get it loaded to YouTube yet and apparently, it’s too big for this website. In the meantime, you can see the core show notes to the podcast in the PDF below. There’s photos of the Theory U and our list of 10-questions we developed as our Appreciative Inquiry survey we used at Maine Medical Center. I hope this episode gives you some very practical tools…

People in this episode

Host: Jon Lowrance

Topics covered

  • Appreciative Inquiry
  • team listening
  • organizational development
  • Theory U
  • team engagement
  • work improvement

Keywords

  • Appreciative Inquiry
  • Theory U
  • teamwork
  • organizational development
  • communication
  • Maine Medical Center
  • psychological safety

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Maine Medical Center

Books & works: The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation

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