Appreciative Inquiry - Audio Tidbits Podcast

Audio Tidbits Podcast

Cooperrider, David L. and Diana Whitney. Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Incorporated, 2005. … Cooperrider, David L., Diana Whitney, Jacqueline M. Stavros, with Foreword by Ronald Fry. Appreciative Inquiry: Handbook for Leaders of Change. Second Edition. Brunswick, OH: Crown Custom Publishing, Incorporated, 2008.

Companies all too often call for low-morale surveys instead of designing rigorous inquiries into extraordinary moments of high engagement, commitment, and passionate achievement.

Human systems grow in the direction of their deepest and most frequent inquiries. What is it that you want more of in your organization?

Our experience suggests that organizational change needs to look a lot more like an inspired movement than a neatly packaged or engineered product.

Every organization has something that works right–things that give it life when it is most alive, effective, successful, and connected in healthy ways to its stakeholders and communities.

Valuing the best of “what is” leads to envisioning what might be. Envisioning involves passionate thinking, creating a positive image of a desired and preferred future. …
The most important resource for generating constructive organizational change or improvement is collective imagination and discourse about the future. One of the basic theorems of the anticipatory view of organizational life is that the image of the future guides what might be called the current behavior of any organism or organization. Much like a movie projected on a screen, human systems are forever projecting ahead of themselves a horizon of expectation that brings the future powerfully into the present as a mobilizing agent. In the final analysis, organizations exist because people who govern and maintain them share some sort of discourse or projection about what the organization is, how it will function, what it will achieve, and what it will likely become.

The most powerful vehicle communities have for changing the social order is through the act of dialogue made possible by language. Therefore, alterations in linguistic practices hold profound implications for changes in social practice.

Organizations do not need to be fixed. They need constant reaffirmation. … The challenge for organizational learning and development is creating the condition for organization-wide appreciation. This is the single most important act that can be taken to ensure the conscious evolution of a valued and positive future.

Transforming the human system and its organization toward an affirmative learning and working environment requires a conscious effort to maintain a positive focus on the dialogue. In so doing, positive affirmations or comments should be encouraged, while negative dialogues should be minimized or avoided altogether.

All organizations have something to value about their past. This element must be appreciated so that change becomes a positive experience without unnecessary resistance from a sense of disruption.

Imagine your organization five … years from now, when everything is just as you always imagined it would be. What has happened? What is different? How have you contributed to this future?