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An AI Summit begins when an organization’s leadership learns about appreciative inquiry and decides to apply it to an organizational issue, challenge, or opportunity. The first task is to enlist the support of a key group of sponsors for the summit. Sponsors are people who ensure the success of the AI Summit process in their organization or community. In corporations they typically include key leaders such as CEOs, division VPs, plant GMs, union stewards, and so forth, and in communities they include the leaders of constituencies that have a stake in the topic to be addressed. These people provide financial and other resources, garner support for the summit in their organization or community, and work closely with the facilitators to make sure that the AI Summit process is on track. Although the support of senior leaders is essential, no one person, function, or level within an organization can be the sole sponsor of an AI. A broader Group Discussion. is needed to enable the necessary participation, information, and leadership. Once sponsorship is established, we create an advisory team made up of sponsors who will provide resources, ensure participation, and offer general guidance for the success of the process. For example, we recently conducted an AI Summit with Park Center, Inc., a comprehensive mental health system in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The CEO, Paul Wilson, was 100 percent behind it and willing to fund it, but to gain broader support, he formed a small advisory team to shape the AI Summit process and promote it with others in the system. The advisory team is less hands-on than the planning team, which is formed later to design and orchestrate the entire summit process. See for more on sponsoring an AI Summit. The planning team for an AI Summit is the working team whose job it is to design, orchestrate, and carry out the entire process from start to finish. They are the ones who link appreciative inquiry to the organization’s core issue or opportunity, and who ensure that the AI Summit is tailored to meet the needs and culture of the organization. We have worked with planning teams as large as forty and as small as three. The ideal size depends on the size of the organization conducting the summit. In general, however, a planning team of twelve to twenty people can represent the interests and functions within an organization. An effective planning team includes a broad and diverse About Group Discussion, of people. Its membership is representative of all those who will attend the summit, internal and external stakeholders alike. For example, in the case of Park Center, the CEO, two VPs, and the three managers all joined the planning team. Then they invited two board members three clients and four employees to join, for a total of fifteen people representing multiple core constituencies. We find that it usually takes at least two to three full days with the whole planning team plus many phone calls, e-mails, and smaller meetings to adequately plan a summit. We make the initial two-day meeting as similar to an AI Summit as possible so that the planning team members can gain a deep experiential understanding of what a summit is like.
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