Appreciative Inquiry

David Cooperrider

'Appreciative Inquiry' is a very effective approach to changing organisational culture. It offers an effective and exciting way to re-think the way organisations make sense of the world and of the basic interactions between individuals.

The approach is based on the premise that ‘organisations change in the direction in which they inquire.’ So an organisation which inquires into problems will keep finding problems, but an organisation which attempts to appreciate what is best in itself will discover more and more that is good. It can then to use these discoveries to build a new future where the best becomes more common.
Appreciative Inquiry is a challenge to conventional methods of providing leadership and managing change. You will find appreciative inquiry interesting if you believe that:

• Organizations are not like machines - they don't have an objective reality the way a table or a rock does;

• Organizations are a social reality and social reality is co-constructed - we create the social systems we are in through our interactions with each other;

• Important human processes like communication, decision-making, and conflict management are effected more by how the people involved make meaning out of their interactions than by skilful application of any particular technique;

• Attempts to find or develop the right formula for successful leadership and change are a misguided attempt to treat social reality as if it were objective reality.

The theory of appreciative inquiry was developed by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva in a paper they published in 1986. Almost all change processes are predicated on some form of inquiry - some attempt to study the social system before or during the process of trying to change it. But the form of inquiry they use is "positivism" - a kind of inquiry that treats social reality as if it had objective properties. As if we could discover the right levers to pull and buttons to push to create the outcomes we seek.

In addition, most change processes are based on problem-solving processes. We start by asking "what's the problem". When we do that, we focus energy on what we want less of and work to "fix" things. Appreciative Inquiry is based on a different set of assumptions. Here are some of them:

1. You create more effective organizations by focusing on what you want more of, not what you want less of. Whatever you want more of already exists, even if only in small quantities

2. It's easier to create change by amplifying the positive qualities of a group or organization than by trying to fix the negative qualities

3. Through the act of inquiry we create the social realities we are trying to understand

4. Getting people to inquire together into the best examples of what they want more of creates it's own momentum toward creating more positive organizations

AI is based on a deceptively simple premise: that organizations grow in the direction of what they repeatedly ask questions about and focus their attention on. AI does not focus on changing people. Instead, it invites people to engage in building the kinds of organizations they want to live in. That’s hard to resist.
Appreciative Inquiry has been effectively applied in the following ways:

• Building common vision where one is currently lacking

• Creating openness and rapport between people and groups who don't trust each other

• Developing new approaches to human resource issues that will be well accepted by organizational members and lead to positive change

• Creating a positive work climate where a negative one previously prevailed

• Discovering, understanding and amplifying the positive forces already existing in organizations

• Accelerating the development of new teams

• An alternative to conventional team building processes for existing teams

• Community development in various ways

Cooperrider and Srivastva contrast the commonplace notion that, “organizing is a problem to be solved” with the appreciative proposition that, “organizing is a miracle to be embraced”. Inquiry into organizational life, they say, should have four characteristics. It should be:

• Appreciative

• Applicable

• Provocative

• Collaborative

The Appreciative Inquiry approach is often worked out in practice by using the ‘4-D’ model:

Discover - people talk to one another, often via structured interviews, to discover the times when the organisation is at its best. These stories are told as richly as possible.

Dream - the dream phase is often run as a large group conference where people are encouraged to envision the organisation as if the peak moments discovered in the ‘discover’ phase were the norm rather than exceptional.

Design - a small team is empowered to go away and design ways of creating the organisation dreamed in the conference(s)

Deliver - the final phase is to implement the changes.