The Nilambhur Panchayath in Kerala contacted an OD Consultancy late in 2008 to help them in their endeavor to eradicate Dowry in their village.  Santhosh Babu of OD Alternatives took the trip to his home state to conduct the training.

The gathering had all stakeholders of an ideal community: Students, teachers, senior citizens, housewives, fulltime members of political parties and religious leaders. On top of a small hillock, under a temporarily built shack a hundred people spent three days telling stories, sharing dreams and planning the future of the Panchayath. This was Nilambhur Panchayath in Kerala participating in a planning process to eradicate dowry using Appreciative Inquiry. For us this was taking the work that we have been doing for the last ten years with Fortune 500 companies to the grass root level for the first time.

The tool, Appreciative inquiry turns the problem-solving approach on its head. It focuses on a community’s achievements rather than its problems, and seeks to go beyond participation to foster inspiration at the grass-roots level. Appreciative inquiry is a strategy for purposeful change that identifies the best of “what is” to pursue dreams and possibilities of “what could be.” It is a co-operative search for the strengths; passions and life-giving forces that are found within every system—those factors that hold the potential for inspired, positive change.

In three days we took the entire hundred diverse stakeholder participants through four stages. Stage one they looked inside to find what is good about the Panchayath and what is the life giving force. This process called “Discovery,” energized and gave hope to the community. We knew that if we look for problems, we would see problems and if we look for strengths, we would see strengths. From here participants moved to the Dream stage where they vividly acted out the ideal dowry-less dream state. The group then got down to various initiatives that could help them to reach the Dreams and we called this stage, the Design stage. Finally they detailed actions plans with times lines as a part of the Deliver stage. So through the stages of Discover, Dream, Design and Deliver, the microcosm of this Panchayath plunged into this ambitious goal of making this a dowry free place.

We have been facilitating Large Group Interventions using tools like Appreciative Inquiry and Future Search and found them highly useful to get everyone engaged and involved in a common cause. As the focus is on what is working and expanding that, instead of finding the problem and solving it, people always have positive energy towards purposeful action. Secondly Large Group Intervention methodologies’ get every stakeholder into one room.

Many change and transformation initiatives fail due to lack of ownership among all the stakeholders. Traditional problem solving and Change Management approaches use a Top down, Bottom up or Pilot project approach and fail to involve the whole system in the overall process. When the whole system is not involved many people who are involved in a change initiative become like the blind men seeing the elephant. Organisations and communities are complex living systems where every component of the system is interlinked and connected. Only by bringing all parts into one room, we could explore the complexity of the system.

When Aryadan Shoukath, The president of the Panchayath, approached us, the first thing that we decided was that we will involve the whole system in the planning stage and we will do this as a three-day process. Never in my life have I experienced all the political parties and religious groups joining hands together and taking ownership completely. The trick is to explore and find the common ground that is big enough for all stakeholders to stand, the intent is to involve everyone and the focus is on the task, not on the differences.

Change is given the opportunity to occur when three elements are in place simultaneously: dissatisfaction with the present situation, a compelling vision of how the change will create a better future, and first steps for reaching the vision. If any of these elements are missing or collectively they are less powerful than the resistance to the change, then change will not take place. Thus, the first part of our intervention focused on creating a common database and the foundation for the dissatisfaction. In this case the President of the Panchayath did a survey and found that poor families spend a minimum of 300,000 Rupees (about $6200) as dowry and many of them even sell their only house to get the dowry money. So we had a powerful dissatisfaction to begin with. Then the focus of our intervention was to create a future that is far more desirable than that which caused the dissatisfaction. The three-day intense process ended with all the participants committing to blue print that would lead them to the dream.

Many leaders till find it uncomfortable using a Large Group Intervention tool as they feel the outcome cannot be controlled by few. So there could be an ambiguity about how the intervention might go when engages the whole system. People who are control freaks would have tough time believing that involving the whole system in a planning process can be highly productive. But the fact is that if we can engage the whole system in change and transformation initiatives creatively, we will have high level of ownership from all. It may be good idea to do a large Group Intervention with Satyam employees now to explore how they could bounce back soon.