What Is
It?
Appreciative Inquiry, a
concept and approach conceived and
described in the work of Dr. David
Cooperrider and his colleagues at Case
Western Reserve’s school of Organization
Behavior, is a worldview, a paradigm of
thought and understanding that holds
organizations to be affirmative systems
created by humankind as solutions to
problems. It is a theory, a mindset, and
an approach to analysis that leads to
organizational learning and creativity.
Used in place of the
traditional problem solving
approach—finding what is wrong and
forging solutions to fix the
problems—Appreciative Inquiry seeks what
is “right” in an organization. It is a
habit of mind, heart, and imagination
that searches for the success, the
life-giving force, the incidence of joy.
It moves toward what the organization is
doing right and provides a frame for
creating an imagined future that builds
on and expands the joyful and
life-giving realities as the metaphor
and organizing principle of the
organization.
The 20th Century habit of
mind, heart and imagination in Western
thought reaches the depths of cynicism.
Metaphorically, in much of the world
today, the glass is half empty. Indeed,
cynicism is considered reality so much
so that the terms “Pollyanna,”
“unrealistic,” and “naive” are used to
describe those who approach life from
the perspective of the glass as half
full.
Appreciative Inquiry is
an articulated theory that rationalizes
and reinforces the habit of mind that
moves through the world in a generative
frame, seeking and finding images of the
possible rather than scenes of disaster
and despair.
Why Do
It?
Why do we need to look
for the positive, for the life-giving
forces, for those moments of joy and
satisfaction? One might argue that such
a vantage point at least guarantees a
good night’s sleep. However, the habit
of seeking and finding the generative
rather than the destructive image
appears to have far more power than
simple peace of mind.
In the early parts of
this century, Western thought, based on
the work of Freud and Jung, believed
that human behavior was caused by the
events of one’s childhood and family
reality. To change behavior, a person
had to delve into this “historical
reality” and find ways to resolve those
issues. Mid-century, behavioral
scientists such as Skinner and Lewin
suggested that the past was mostly
irrelevant. What controlled human
behavior was the environment and
circumstances of life in the present
moment. Human behavior, they believed,
was shaped by “current reality.”
As we approach the end of
the century, scientists are beginning to
understand the impact on human behavior
of “anticipatory reality.” Who among us
has not experienced a quickened
heartbeat and other physical symptoms of
anxiety as we approach a person that we
imagine is angry or upset with us? It is
the anticipation of the behavior of the
other that generates a physical response
in us. In the same way, we have the
power to create the positive events in
our lives such as the joy we experience
in anticipation of a pleasurable
experience.
There is much research
going on today, and much to be observed
that suggests that we human beings
create the future that we imagine. As
leading nations of the world more and
more imagined the terrible destruction
of nuclear war, each armed itself to the
edge of financial collapse. Images of
violence and destruction became the
organizing principle of society. Today,
the streets of American cities are rife
with violence and destruction. The arms
of war are even in the hands of children
who slay each other in gang wars or by
accident in their homes playing with
guns bought by fearful and cynical
people living in a paradigm of fear. It
is not hard to imagine how such a world
might end.
There is, however, an
opposing force, a shift in the wind. The
time of change is upon us. Beneath this
blanket of cynicism and fear, movements
are afoot across the globe that say
“enough!“ Women are changing their
roles; environmentalists are organizing
to regenerate the planet;
non-traditional spiritual communities
and movements are reaching beyond the
customary in search of more hopeful
belief systems, more creative symbols
and rituals.
In organizations across
government, non-profit, and the private
sector there are signs of change. The
literature is beginning to reflect some
of the new habits of mind, heart, and
imagination —Total Quality Management, a
learning organization, valuing
diversity.
Appreciative Inquiry as a
system of thought is based on social
science research that affirms these
trends and movements by demonstrating
the power of generative images to create
a world of hope and possibility. This is
not about denying the negative and
destructive. It is, rather, about
focusing on the positive and creative as
a force for building a more positive
future.
The knowledge base that
supports this approach comes from widely
diverse fields such as medicine, sports,
behavioral science, anthropology. For
example, since the mid-fifties, Western
medical science has become aware of the
power of the mind to heal the body. This
concept has always been the basis of
healing in Eastern cultures, but the
split in mind and body that began with
the Greeks and dominates Western thought
and behavior is rediscovering this
mind/body connection using scientific
experimentation and documented data.
The widely documented
placebo studies beginning in the mid
1950’s have shown that people given
“sugar” pills, believing that they are
taking “real” medicine, get well at
about the same rate as those taking the
medicine.
Though the placebo
phenomenon has been controversial for
some twenty years, most of the medical
profession now accepts as genuine the
fact that anywhere from one-third to
two-thirds of all patients will show
marked physiological and emotional
improvement in symptoms simply by
believing they are given an effective
treatment, even when that treatment is
just a sugar pill or some other inert
substance. (Beecher, 1955; White, Tursky,
and Schwartz, 1985.)
For a comprehensive
discussion of the research in this and
the following fields cited in this
paper, see “Positive Image, Positive
Action: The Affirmative Basis of
Organizing” by David L. Cooperrider.
Norman Cousins
popularized this notion in his book
about his recovery from a life
threatening illness. Currently, a whole
series of books, including Quantum
Healing and The Mind-Body Connection by
the Western trained physician, Deepak
Chopra, an Indian by birth, articulates
the reasons for and the power of the
mind/body connection and its importance
in keeping well. Simonton (Getting Well
Again) at his clinic in Texas,
documented an unusually high rate of
recovery from “terminal” cancer by
patients who worked with resolving their
psychological issues and practiced
positive imagery. Bill Moyers created a
whole series for the Public Broadcasting
System on the power of the mind to heal
the body.
In another set of
studies, behavioral scientists looked at
the ratio of positive as opposed to
negative thought patterns in people
facing major heart surgery. The studies
demonstrated that those who approached
the operation with a feeling that the
doctor was the best, the medical
techniques proven and safe, and their
chances of being well again were
excellent, recovered at a much greater
rate than those who approached the
operation with fear and concern. In
these studies, it was concluded that the
desired ratio of positive thoughts to
negative thoughts is approximately 2 to
1. With a 2 to 1 ratio, there is a
marked difference in the level of well
being that a person experiences.
A set of experiments
called the Pygmalion studies, carried
out in classrooms with school children,
demonstrated the power of another
person’s image of us in shaping our
performance. In these studies, teachers
were told that one group of students
were not very intelligent, tended to do
poorly and were often not well-behaved
in the classroom, while the second group
was bright, hard-working, and
successful. The teacher believed these
to be the facts while in actuality, the
division of students into the two groups
was entirely random. Within one
semester, however, almost without
exception those labeled poor students
were performing poorly and those labeled
good students were excelling.
Further study showed that
the effects of this image held by the
teacher affected the students far into
the future. (By inference, the same
effect can be anticipated with images
held by parents, bosses, and other
authority figures.) Furthermore, it was
proven that the image that the teacher
held of the student was a more powerful
predictor of how well the child would do
than IQ scores, home environment, or
past performance. So damaging were these
experiments to the students labeled
“poor,” that the scientific community
discontinued them. Who among us would
want our child in such an experiment?
Finally, there are many
examples in the sports arena of the
power of the positive image in creating
success for athletes. Books such as Jack
Nicklaus’s Golf My Way argue that the
positive affirmation (“I’m going to hit
it down the middle of the fairway,”
rather than “Don’t hit it into the
woods.”) causes the whole body to
respond to what the mind imagines is
possible. Paradoxically, most of us
believe that elimination of failures
(negative self-monitoring, i.e., No, not
the woods) will improve performance when
exactly the opposite appears to be true.
One particularly
interesting experiment used video to
record a bowling match. For one team,
the experimenters edited out all of the
mistakes and showed the team the film of
everything they had done right. For the
second team, they edited out everything
done right and used the more traditional
training method of showing the team its
mistakes and strategizing how to correct
them. While both teams improved, the
team seeing what they did right had 100%
greater improvement than did the team
that was shown its mistakes.
The mind, it seems, does
not know how to negate a negative; i.e.,
when we say to a child, “No, do not go
into the swimming pool,” what the mind
records is the swimming pool. Tape
recorders on the backs of a group of
three-year-old children showed that over
80% of the messages they got were of the
NO, NOT variety.
With this kind of
scientific evidence emerging, it makes
sense to rethink our approach to
organization development. Appreciative
Inquiry is not, however, just another
technique for organizational business as
usual. It requires an enlargement of the
current paradigm of linear thinking and
a rational, logical, and all too often
cynical view of the world, to one that
includes the creativity and seeming
chaos of a multi-faceted approach to
“knowing” that includes body and spirit
as well as mind. The power of the
Western way of knowing is not in
dispute. What is up for examination is
the limitations of that approach.
Appreciative Inquiry provides an
intellectual construct and practice that
gives organizations an expanded way of
viewing reality and a practical
rationale and method for creating a
desired future.
How To Do
It
Because Appreciative
Inquiry calls for a sea change in
attitude and thinking patterns, it is
far more than a technique or methodology
for “fixing” organizations. As a
concept, it requires an organization to
make a commitment to continuous
learning, growth, and generative change.
Step One must always be an
internalization of the theory and
concepts of this worldview. Once that is
achieved, organizations have the ability
to apply the concepts in innovative ways
to achieve a healthier and more creative
environment.
As one way of using
Appreciative Inquiry in an organization,
a small work-group might gather to study
the concepts in order to gain an
in-depth understanding of Appreciative
Inquiry. This is often followed by a
dialogue process with members of this
group interviewing each other as well as
other members of the organization asking
questions that elicit the creative and
life-giving events experienced in the
workplace.
These dialogues often
begin with three or four general
questions such as:
1. Looking at your
entire experience with the
organization, remember a time when
you felt most alive, most fulfilled,
or most excited about your
involvement in the organization.
2. Let’s talk for a
moment about some things you value
deeply; specifically, the things you
value about yourself, about the
nature of your work, and about this
organization.
-
Without being
humble, what do you value most
about yourself as a person and
as a member of this
organization?
-
When you are
feeling best about your work,
what about the task itself do
you value?
-
What do you value
about the organization?
-
What is the most
important thing this
organization has contributed to
your life? to the world?
3. What do you
experience as the core factors that
give life to this organization? Give
some examples of how you experience
those factors.
4. What three wishes
would you make to heighten the
vitality and health of this
organization?
The interviews are not
soliciting facts and opinions so much as
examples, stories, metaphors. In the
search for the generative and joyful
moments, the interviewer elicits the
particular rather than the general. The
purpose is to find those moments,
events, stories of the best there is.
Using the data from these
original dialogues, the workgroup looks
for the themes and topics that run
through the stories. These topics become
the focus of a more specific interview
protocol that seeks to enlarge and learn
more about the chosen topics. For
example, if the original data suggests
that COMMITMENT is an important factor
in many of the stories about the best of
times in the organization, then the
workgroup might choose to ask more
questions from others in the workplace
about their experiences with commitment.
This second round of
interviews produces information about
four to six topics that become the basis
for building “Possibility Propositions”
that describe how the organization will
be in the future. Each topic or theme
can be fashioned into a future
statement. And these statements become
an integral part of the vision for the
organization.
Often, this process is
completed with a future search
conference that uses the Appreciative
Inquiry data as a basis for imaging a
positive and creative future for the
organization.
Examples
of Applications
Over the past two years,
we have been involved with a team
(funded by a U.S. AID grant and directed
by Ada Jo Mann and Claudia Liebler) in
designing and delivering an Appreciative
Inquiry process to management teams of
International Development Agencies,
known in the U.S. as Private Voluntary
Organizations or PVO’s. Teams from
selected organizations include the CEO
and the senior managers (from three to
nine people) who commit to be involved
in all facets of the project.
The process includes:
-
Step 1: A consultant
trained in Appreciative Inquiry is
assigned to an organization and
spends a full day explaining the
theoretical basis for the work and
helping the team construct an
Appreciative Inquiry interview
protocol..
-
Step 2: The team uses
the protocol to interview all or a
significant majority of the people
in their organization often
including stakeholders outside the
staff in the process.
-
Step 3: The team
brings the data and attends a
week-long Institute of PVO/CEO
Excellence where they engage in
experiential processes of management
culminating in a set of possibility
propositions written from the
collected data.
-
Step 4: The
consultant is available for four
days of follow-up meetings with the
organization as it works to
incorporate the possibility
propositions into its mission and
vision.
-
Step 5: An evaluation
team visits the organization to
assess what impact the institute has
had.
A second model is one
created by Schiller and Associates for
an Appreciative Inquiry into gender
issues with a major corporation whose
aim is to include women at top levels of
management. Instead of the usual models
of confrontation, identification of
problems, and strategies to improve the
situation, we designed a method for
seeking the creative and successful
partnerships of women and men working
together in that organization. Taking
those examples, the organization is
constructing principles and
possibilities for creative and
generative working relationships between
women and men.
In a second Schiller
contract with a major corporation,
studies are also being made of
successful practices in other
organizations, a process akin to
Benchmarking best practices.
Finally, the use of this
methodology in a division of a U.S.
Government agency led to the
construction of a reorganization
strategy that was useful to that agency
during the “reinventing government”
phase of the Clinton/Gore
administration. The division moved from
fear that their programs would not
survive into a pro-active mode of
creating an ideal environment in which
their programs could thrive.
These are only a few
examples of the uses of Appreciative
Inquiry in a variety of organizations.
Appreciative Inquiry is not a
methodology. It is a way of expanding
our vision to include the possible. In
each incidence of use, the model is
constructed to fit the needs of the
organization. There is no right or wrong
method, no perfect process. Some groups
begin slowly and others jump in
headlong. The work of the consultant is
to help the organization find its own
way, its own path. Appreciative Inquiry
is an inquiry process, a continuous
learning paradigm that seeks the most
creative and generative realities.
Consultants working
within this paradigm are reporting
amazing transformations of organizations
including renewed commitment, released
energy of the workforce, far less
complaining and the attendant hopeless
affect, and innovative, creative images
of the future that become the driving
force for the organization. It is not an
easy transformation. The ingrained
beliefs and models that come from the
dominant paradigm are not easy to
examine. Often people have a high stake
in rationalizing what they have always
believed, finding it hard, if not
impossible, to expand their vision to
include a larger reality.
The key to the successful
use of Appreciative Inquiry is not to
say that the current way of seeing the
world is wrong; rather, it is to help
people realize that we can be limited
and constrained by our inability to see
larger and more expansive realities that
are often right under our noses. It is
no longer new news that we simply don’t
see what doesn’t fit into our concept of
what is real or true. Appreciative
Inquiry is about freeing ourselves to
explore beyond what we already know and
understand. Such freedom can feel
threatening and frightening. But once
embraced, it is often thrilling!
Finally, Appreciative
Inquiry is not new. Much that is
happening today and much of history has
been impacted by those who see the
possible even in the most desperate of
times. A powerful example of a leader
using the appreciative approach is found
in Isaiah Berlin’s account of Winston
Churchill’s leadership during the second
world war:
In 1940 he (Churchill)
assumed an indomitable stoutness, an
unsurrendering quality on the part of
his people... He idealized them with
such intensity that in the end they
approached his ideal and began to see
themselves as he saw them: “the buoyant
and imperturbable temper of Britain
which I had the honour to express”—it
was indeed, but he had the lion’s share
in creating it. So hypnotic was the
force of his words, so strong his faith,
that by the sheer intensity of his
eloquence he bound his spell upon them
until it seemed to them that he was
indeed speaking what was in their hearts
and minds. Doubtless it was there; but
largely dormant until he had awoken it
within them.
After he had spoken to
them in the summer of 1940 as no one
else has ever before or since, they
conceived a new idea of themselves...
They went forward into battle
transformed by his words... He created
a heroic mood and turned the fortunes of
the Battle of Britain not by catching
the (life-diminishing) mood of his
surroundings but by being impervious to
it...
As Cooperrider notes in
the “Positive Image, Positive Action”
article cited previously, “Churchill’s
impact and the guiding images he helped
create were the result of his towering
ability to cognitively dissociate all
seeming impossibilities, deficiencies,
and imperfections from a given situation
and to see in his people and country
that which had fundamental value and
strength. His optimism, even in
Britain’s darkest moment, came not from
a Pollyanna-like sense that ‘everything
is fine’ but from a conviction that was
born from what he, like few others,
could actually see in his country. . . .
The appreciative eye, we are beginning
to understand, apprehends ‘what is’
rather than ‘what is not’ and in this
represents a rigorous cognitive ability
to bracket out all seeming imperfections
from that which has fundamental value.”
In the Roman Catholic
Church there are organizations of men
and women called ‘religious orders.’
These are organizations where the
members are priests, brothers or nuns.
They typically conduct many different
ministries — hospitals, colleges,
schools, parishes, social service
agencies and a wide range of nonprofit
charitable organizations. Traditionally
they have constituted ownership of the
vast majority of private Roman Catholic
educational and healthcare institutions
throughout the world, and so constitute
a significant and interesting part of
the nonprofit sector.
Jane Magruder Watkins,
a past Chair of NTL Institute for
Applied Behavioral Science in
Washington, DC, has worked in nearly 50
countries on five continents. This
global perspective has led her into an
interest in transformational processes
for organizations that are facing the
realities of an environment that is
constantly shifting and changing. She
has been at the forefront of the
development of Appreciative Inquiry, an
organizational transformation process
that enables creativity and generativity
within systems and results in the kind
of agile organization needed to succeed
in the emerging environment. In her work
as a consultant for organizational
development and transformation, her
clients include Corporations, Government
Agencies and the non-profit sector.
As an innovator in the use of
Appreciative Inquiry, she has developed
and applied appreciative approaches in
all aspects of Organization Development
— strategic planning, team building,
executive coaching, leadership
development, conflict resolution,
valuing diversity, project development,
joint ventures, partnerships,
evaluation. Jane holds an MA degree in
English Literature; an MS degree in
Organization Development and has done
post graduate research and study at the
Judge Institute of Management Studies at
Cambridge University, UK.
David L. Cooperrider
is Chairman of the SIGMA Program for
Human Cooperation and Global Action and
Associate Professor of Organizational
Behavior, at Case Western Reserve
University's Weather-head School of
Management. Currently he serves as the
PI of a multi-million dollar grant
working with international organizations
dealing with global issues of human
health, environment, peace, and
sustainable economic development.
Dr. Cooperrider has served as researcher
and consultant to a wide variety of
organizations. Currently, as part of the
above mentioned grant, David and his
colleagues have organizational learning
projects active in 57 organizations
working in over 100 countries in Africa,
Asia, Europe, and North and South
America. David's most recent books
include Organizational Courage and
Executive Wisdom; and Appreciative
Leadership and Management (both with
Suresh Srivastva); International and
Global OD (with Peter Sorensen); and The
Organization Dimensions of Global
Change: No Limits to Cooperation (with
Jane Dutton). David has just been named
editor of a new Sage Publication Book
Series on the Human Dimensions of Global
Change.
