Pre-Summit Work In an Appreciative Inquiry Summit, the pre- summit steering committee comes together typically for a day-and-a-half to two days of design work. They have three or four major things that they need to accomplish.
First, they need to really articulate what is the collective-action task. Secondly, relative to that task, who are all the stakeholders that we want to make sure are in the room? They map the stakeholder groups and give proportionate numbers to those. So if we want young people to be part of the sustainable dairy-industry movement, what percentage of the convention should be young people in order to accomplish our task? How many and what proportions of each stakeholder do we need to have to really advance this task?
And then the third thing they do is develop the pre-summit research. Sometimes they will do Appreciative Inquiry analysis and interviews throughout the industry to lift up the very best of the best, all of the innovations and all of the best practices so that you come into the summit with a database of strengths that really can help build the vision of the future — so the summit is not just an emergent process, but we come into it with some real business and economic insight.
Another task is to come up with the pre- summit momentum building. How do we ensure that we fill the room with the right stakeholders? And then how do we communicate in a way that builds the excitement and momentum? Sometimes groups will do a webcast ahead of time, to prepare people.
Finally, the group starts designing the post- summit follow-through designs even before the summit takes place, so that already there is really good extensive thinking about how we move forward. In the dairy-industry summit, in order to create a sustainable dairy industry for America, in post-summit work they created a new innovation corporation to do the fundraising for a lot of these innovations. And it is quite amazing. I think they raised over $100 million in funds to foster the innovations, like ways of taking methane and turning it into natural-gas pipelines.