Appreciative Inquiry:
Brisbane & the World

At the end of this week Sue and I are travelling to Brisbane to run our Essence of Appreciative Inquiry workshop for the first time there. We’ve run several here in Melbourne and one in Sydney last year, which we will be running again in early May.

Sue is the lead facilitator in these workshops and I assist with the Tai Chi component to reinforce key concepts of AI when required.

Why do I like to work interstate and overseas?

Well, it’s because we both experience and learn from different:

• communities
• cultures
• thinking
• people
• conditions
• food

And we’ve met some very interesting and friendly people when we travel such as:

• The Appreciative Inquiry ‘mob’ at various international conferences – they’re ‘good eggs’
• The stranger who paid our bus fare in Singapore because we didn’t have the correct money
• Linda Wante who so generously provided her home as accommodation for us in Belgium
• Our mini bus driver in Kathmandu – very friendly and helpful
• Two young students in Qindao, (at the Beer Festival) who greeted us like long lost friends

There also have been many surprises along the way:

• A bull that charged at me and didn’t appreciate me taking a photo – I jumped out of the way just in time
• The Belgium waffles – yum! – enough reason to go back there
• The taxi in Kathmandu – I sprinted after it because I’d left my camera in the back seat. I caught it and retrieved my gear – I’ve never run so fast in my life
• The free tickets we were given to the Beer Festival in Qindao, China during a 3 day Appreciative Inquiry workshop we ran for an international school – I don’t drink alchohol but it was fun walking around the fairground and being the only foreigners there
• I discovered that Europe is about 12 movies away from home – thinking otherwise makes it an almost unbearable 23 hours.

Apart from our interstate travel we can now say we are truly international – workshops in Nepal (2009), Belgium (2012) and China (2012) 

We are working hard to increase our work internationally, but Brisbane beckons so we’ll focus on that for now – unless someone overseas contacts us for work, as happened for our AI workshops in China, early one Sunday morning.

Fingers crossed.