Expanding the Dialogue

Bearing in mind that AI is rooted in the theory that we create our future realities through our current relationships and conversations, the task of pulling themes from the interview data is a marvelous opportunity to engage more people in conversations that focus on those things that give life to the organization. The group chosen to “mine” the data and select the themes can be any configuration the AI consultant and the organization co-create. Typical choices in our experience are:

• The external or internal consultant to the process, and/or
• Members of the interview team, and/or
• Members of the senior guidance group (if there is one), and/or
• All or some significant subset of the folks who were interviewed, and/or
• Various combinations of the above.

In the traditional model of OD consulting, the data is almost always collated and often analyzed by the consultant and fed back into the organization as a report or fed back to a working group for action planning. Remembering the theory that the observer always impacts and changes that which is observed, it follows that in an AI process the consultant would never be the one to analyze the data. Given that clients often are accustomed to and comfortable with certain kinds of processes, it may be a bit of a stretch to talk yourself out of the job of analyzing the data. We strongly recommend that you avoid doing that if at all possible since you will, by that act, have theoretically moved yourself and the system out of an AI process. The minimum participation in “mining” the data is the original core group. From there, add as many people as you can talk the client into. Working from the belief that the future is created through dialogue, it makes a great deal of sense to involve as many people as possible in this stage.

If you are successful in having all or some significant subset of the all the folks who were interviewed as part of the group that searches for themes in the data, then you will need to design a process for a large group of people.

Once the themes are identified, the organization is ready to move into the fourth stage of AI—Creating shared images for a preferred future.