Appreciative Inquiry
“The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths, making our weaknesses irrelevant”
-Peter Drucker
Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is the cooperative co-evolutionary search for the best in people, their organizations, and the world around them. It involves the discovery of what gives life to a living system when it is most effective, alive, and constructively capable in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI involves the art and practice of asking unconditional positive questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten its potential. AI interventions focus on the speed of imagination and innovation instead of the negative, critical, and spiraling diagnoses commonly used in organizations. The discovery, dream, design, and destiny model links the energy of the positive core to changes never thought possible. (Cooperrider, Whitney, and Stavros 2008, 3)
AI is a way of being and seeing. It is both a worldview and a process for facilitating positive change in human systems, eg organizations, groups, and communities, It’s assumption is simple: Every human system has something that works right- things that give it life when it is vital, effective, and successful. AI begins by identifying the positive core and connecting to it in ways that heighten energy, sharpen vision and inspire action for change. Working in human systems requires a flexible, open and creative stance that embraces ambiguity and innovation. In any human interaction each person has an experience unique to that individual and substantially different from the experience of every other person. When we inquire into something appreciatively we honour all the parts that make the whole and bring ourselves into right relationship so that we can build together with integrity.
TAILORED TO YOUR NEEDS
I build my approach around my clients wants and needs. I have a variety of Appreciative Inquiry tools that can be tailored to fit your desired outcome.