Appreciative Inquiry (AI) excites me. It is a way of looking at the best of what organizations already do in order to generate change along those lines.

It is celebratory, generative, and inspiring.

I first learned about AI with Gervase Bush in the spring of 2006, as a participant in his program: Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Process for Transformational Change in Social Systems, offered at Concordia University in Montreal. At the time I was involved in a change process at a school for my final Master’s project and recognized the potential that AI had for the work we were doing together at the school. Since then, it has infused my work, indeed much of my life.

In Leadership at Every Level: Appreciative Inquiry in Education by Rich Henry, the author writes:

“AI’s fundamental approach of seeking to discover, honor, and amplify what works, the life-giving elements, is a “system” process that works at all levels, with individual students, one-on-one student-teacher relationships, classrooms, schools, school districts and communities.”

It is simply wonderful, what happens when you explore situations with people from this point of view.

David Cooperrider, one of the initial developers of appreciative inquiry as a change process wrote, with Diana Whitney:

Human systems
grow toward what they
persistently ask questions about.

- David
Cooperrider and Diana Whitney

When I ask you a question in a way that honours what you do I am conducting inquiry in a manner that is both respectful and hopeful. And when that question is surprising, in a way that touches your soul, it can be magical. For example, How does teaching connect you to your passion? When was the moment that you decided you had to become a teacher? What about teaching touches your soul?

I have been touched, moved even, when hearing the answers to these kinds of questions.

AI is much more than simply asking questions, though asking a generative question - a question that generates potential for change - is a way to begin the process that honours the past and sets the stage for meaningful change.

The Appreciative Inquiry Commons answers the question, What is Appreciative Inquiry? with the following:

Appreciative Inquiry is about the coevolutionary search for the best in people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them. In its broadest focus, it involves systematic discovery of what gives “life” to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most constructively capable in economic, ecological, and human terms.

AI involves, in a central way, the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential. It centrally involves the mobilization of inquiry through the crafting of the “unconditional positive question” often-involving hundreds or sometimes thousands of people. In AI the arduous task of intervention gives way to the speed of imagination and innovation; instead of negation, criticism, and spiraling diagnosis,
there is discovery, dream, and design.

AI seeks, fundamentally, to build a constructive union between a whole people and the massive entirety of what people talk about as past and present capacities: achievements, assets, unexplored potentials, innovations, strengths, elevated thoughts, opportunities, benchmarks, high point moments, lived values, traditions, strategic competencies, stories, expressions of
wisdom, insights into the deeper corporate spirit or soul– and visions of valued and possible futures. Taking all of these together as a gestalt, AI deliberately, in everything it does, seeks to work from accounts of this “positive change core”—and
it assumes that every living system has many untapped and rich and inspiring accounts of the positive. Link the energy of this core directly to any change agenda and changes never thought possible are suddenly and democratically mobilized.

If this introduction excites you, or leaves you at least wondering for more, please read the information on the following sites.

And please contact me if you’d like to talk about it!

A Positive Revolution in Change: Appreciative Inquiry by David L. Cooperrider and Diana Whitney (1999)

Leadership at Every Level: Appreciative Inquiry in Education by Rich Henry (2003)

Appreciative Inquiry is not About the Positive by Gervase Bush (2007)

The Appreciative Inquiry Commons…where AI, positive change research and organizational leadership connect for world benefit

Appreciative Inquiry: Seeing our Organizations as Living Systems by Maret Staron (2007)