Appreciative Inquiry - The Dream Phase

Dreams motivate people to speculate about their wishes and future in the form of visions and sounds. A dream-related question that asks for the depiction of a desirable future experience is considered to be an energetic dream.

The kind of questions asked during Dream Stage make the narrator speak on −

what the future looks like,
what situations are desired,
how the future environment looks like, etc

It inspires a positive and concrete vision of the future and boosts the expectations of positive possibilities and growth opportunities in the future. The questions asked in this page encourage the narrator to reveal his best capabilities, his interests, his beliefs, the importance of others in his life, and so on.

The purpose of this Dream Stage is to fuel the imagination of all participants. In the Dream Stage, realistic, experience-backed elements are combined to form the dream image of the future. The dreamers perceive the reality from a different point of view, and can depict the possibilities and opportunities for the future.

Questions Asked during the Dream Stage

Employees need to develop the desire for a glorious future, which their actions in the present will help them achieve. This goes against the conventional methods of setting targets, so naturally, old-timers might think of you as a bit delusional, but the truth is that we cannot encounter innovation without living a dream.

The following theme has been provided to conduct a Dream Appreciative Inquiry. The focus is on providing a neutral environment and a list of key factors that any of the instructors use in the conversation, when they feel that the narrator needs a lead.

Dream Appreciative Interview Theme

Let us dream something. Feel free to fall asleep. Start dreaming about the key factors (while naming them) that contribute to your life’s quality. Some of these questions are related to the people in your life −

Who is doing what?
What is happening?
What are you doing?
How does your life look?
How organized is your life?
With whom are you engaged?
Do you see any other engaged services?
How do you see your days, weeks, months, and so on?

The second part of the dream

In this part of the dream interview, the instructors try to create a dream in which the person, they are talking to, does all the actions he wants to in his real life. The instructors motivate the participant saying that people only get one chance to dream so they should let it all out: all his desires, wishes, expectations, and speculations of the future. They paint a beautiful future on the canvas of dreams.

Setting the Theme

Let us fall asleep. Let us dream something in the present working scenario. Dream that you make active use of all the key factors and attributes important for you. Based on that, answer the following questions −

How do perceive your organization’s ideal work environment to look like?
What do your dreams say to you about your approach towards it?
Do you find your dreams to be attractive and ambitious enough?
Are these steps short term or long term with respect to time?
Up to what extent has your environment changed?
To what extent your environment needs change?
Have all the perspectives been explored by you?
What are the steps in which you need others?
How do you organize your work

Enlarging the Dream

You all can help one another to carve the dream for a finer and a clearer picture. Just like a diamond needs to be cut to make it shine, a dream also needs certain polishing for it to shine like a diamond. Project such a clear picture of the dream on others, so that, they would be able to feel, taste, smell, touch and even see the dream right in front of them.

At this stage, the following questions may come in handy −

What difference can we see in one year from now?
Who is with me in this dream?