[MUSIC] In this session we're going to go through one more story of the, using the AI process for positive change. Personally it's a story I love because it has a very unexpected outcome or result. So here we go. This is a story about a local steel mill that is part of one of the top global multinational steel companies in the world today. This happens to be a very productive mill. It's at the very top quartile in the global company at one ton per man hour. However, at the time of this story, it's also one of the least effective or least safe mills in North America that reports to the occupational safety and health administration. So we have a very productive site but a site that's not doing very well in terms of safety. Locally this site was reborn out of bankruptcy with a participative management orientation. A loyal workforce that had shutdown the previous plant in the appropriate manner. If you don't shut down a steel furnace correctly and take the time to do it correctly, the cost of ever using it again is prohibitive. So there was something about the workforce and their dedication to the steel making and to the site that they had, many had spent a good part of their life in was an important part of the beginning of this story. And then of course, the venture capitalist, the interest they had in reopening the mill under new ownership. So, this mill decided to have a AI summit, again the 4D process, to help concretize their core values. They had been working in a 35-40 person union management team over several years, with an OD consultant, to learn together about teamwork, about conflict management, about several things, and as they learned together, they also developed a sort of a very strong sense of common values. However, when time came to, they were interested in rolling these out, so to speak, or disseminating these into the whole site, they obviously saw that, well we can't just announce these. We can't just create nice little placards and expect everybody to believe them or to internalize them. So they saw appreciative inquiry as a way to bring about a change whereby everybody at the site, all 1,400 people internalized, owned and were committed to a core set of values. The way they went about implementing AI was to create questions and interview the entire workforce. So this group of 40, each trained five other people who then went out and each did six or seven interviews and then they summarized those on a simple form and work them back up so that they engaged about 95% of their employees in a brief conversation about values. And based on that, they brought about 150 to 200 together for a one day summit, a one day work through the 4D cycle, and they were able to refine their questions for that one day based on what they had heard in all the pre-summit interviews. Now if you remember, when you go through that 4D process, when you move from dream to design, people throw up all kinds of actionable ideas, and then they vote on them. And the ones that get the highest votes, then people freely select that's the one I want to work on, that's the one I want to help make happen, and that newly formed design team is still multi-stakeholder, multi-shift, multi-function, et cetera, but then they decide what's their aspiration, what's their change goal or target. So one of the teams that was formed at that point in this value summit was a team on safety. And so they found themselves over under the safety flip chart on the wall. The new team, this is the beginning of the design phase, and the first thing they talk to each other why did we choose to come here right now? What is it about safety, what is it about the idea that draws me here, that I really want to work on it, and when they listen to each other whatever their answers were to that question, they then use those words, those phrases to come up with their aspiration statement. So here it is. Steel Mill USA is an organization that is injury free. All employees understand that safety is our number one priority. We are all committed to take action to correct safety issues. We take ownership in our injury free environment and culture. So this is the new aspiration of a sub-team from the summit. That team then developed their own action plan. Their idea was a very bold idea. They wanted to repeat the process that had led up to this summit. They wanted to go interview everybody at the site about safety, one-on-one, collect those interviews and then use that data to refine the questions and the topic for a one-day summit on safety to be held in the following year. The dates here become very important, so let me walk through it one more time. Their plan which they had propose to senior management was, we, there were about 20 people in their group. We will train five others. Those five will do six or seven more interviews. We'll cover the entire workforce. And we'll do that between September, October, November of 2006, one-on-one interviews. We'll collect all that data after the holiday break. In December, January, February we will make sense of that data. We'll refine our questions and topic for a one day summit which we would aim for the end of March or early April. So that's what they did, the senior management said yes to the proposal. So this team of 20, they formulated their questions and then they set up a process, a cascading process so that they interviewed five or six others of their colleagues and train them at the same time to then go do each of them, five or six more interviews. So that way they covered the total full time and part time employee base at that time at the site. So these are employee to employee interviews, and they last 15, 20 minutes max. So people did them on breaks. People did them at lunch. People did them in the pub after the shift. And they had a simple single page summary. Quotable quotes, headlines from the stories, headlines from the dream question, specific change ideas, very simple, one page summary to their interviews. They put all of that together, they refined questions, they held their summit in March of 2007. So I'm going to ask you, in a moment, to pause this tape and to reflect on what are the questions that you want to ask when you have all these employee to employee interviews? So put yourself in the position of this team coming out of the summit. Your plan has been approved. It's now that we're coming up to September of 2006, we've got a system set up so we can cover everybody in the plan, but what are the questions we're going to ask. From the appreciative inquiry perspective and given our aspiration statement for this project, what questions would you ask? So pause now, take a few notes, and then come back. [MUSIC]
