Appreciative Inquiry

Most change methods start with a diagnosis: find the gap, analyze its causes, fix them. Appreciative Inquiry reverses the starting point. It asks people to study the moments when their organization worked at its best, and to build the future from the conditions that made those moments possible.

The approach rests on an idea Cooperrider and colleagues later stated as a set of principles: organizations move in the direction of what they ask questions about. Asking "why do our projects fail?" focuses attention on failure; asking "when did a project go really well, and why?" focuses it on what to repeat.

Appreciative Inquiry is participative by design. The people who will live with the change do the inquiry, rather than outside experts.

Appreciative Inquiry is therefore both a method and a choice about where attention goes.

1. Discover. People interview each other about peak experiences and identify what gives life to the organization when it is at its best.
2. Dream. Groups imagine what the organization could become if those strengths were the norm, and express it as a shared picture of the future.
3. Design. Participants turn the dream into concrete proposals: structures, processes and ways of working that would make it real.
4. Destiny. People commit to actions and keep learning as they put the design into practice. Some versions call this stage Deliver.

The cycle turns around a topic chosen at the start, phrased in positive terms. Some practitioners make this choice a separate first stage, Define, which gives a 5-D version.

The Appreciative Inquiry 4-D cycle therefore moves from what is, to what might be, to what should be, to what will be.

Appreciative Inquiry does not pretend problems do not exist. A problem is reframed as the absence of something people want, and the inquiry looks for where it already exists.

Appreciative Inquiry is therefore a different entry point to change, not a refusal to deal with difficulties.

Harbourside Council wants to improve how its departments work together on resident requests. Earlier reviews listed failures and produced little change.

This time, the change team chooses the topic "exceptional joined-up service". Staff from several departments interview each other about a case they handled well together (Discover). In a workshop, they describe what a typical request would look like if every case went that way (Dream). Cross-department groups then propose a shared case-ownership rule and a weekly huddle (Design). Volunteers pilot both and report back to the group (Destiny).

The proposals come from staff, so ownership is high from the start. The pilot is still tracked with ordinary measures.

Appreciative Inquiry works best, as here, when the change needs commitment and ideas more than technical analysis.

Appreciative Inquiry and positive psychology share a focus on strengths, hope and what helps people and groups thrive, rather than only on deficits. Positive psychology was launched as a field by Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 2000, more than a decade after Cooperrider and Srivastva's paper.

The two developed separately; according to Cooperrider, positive organizational scholarship later counted Appreciative Inquiry among its pillars.

Appreciative Inquiry is therefore an early organizational expression of the strengths-based thinking that positive psychology later formalized.

Appreciative Inquiry has a strong practitioner following and a large body of published cases. Its evidence base is still mostly case studies rather than controlled comparisons.

Gervase Bushe and Aniq Kassam reviewed 20 published cases and found that only 7 produced transformational change. In their analysis, those cases created new ideas and let people act on them, rather than relying on a positive focus alone.

Critics also note that an insistence on the positive can silence real concerns. People with negative experiences may feel unheard, and their objections may resurface later as resistance.

Appreciative Inquiry is therefore most effective when people can also voice concerns, and when the inquiry generates new ideas, not just good feelings.