The Appreciative Inquiry Commons, a worldwide portal devoted to the sharing of academic resources and practical tools on Appreciative Inquiry and the rapidly growing discipline of positive change, hosted by Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management.

On this page you will find Gervase Bushe's thoughts on...    * Consulting and Training in Appreciative Inquiry    * What is Appreciative Inquiry?    * How has it been used?    * What is Appreciative Process?    * Where can I read more about it?

Appreciative Inquiry and Community Development A website on Appreciative Inquiry in Action.Featuring the electronic book (PDF) by Charles Elliot: Locating the energy for change: An introduction to appreciative inquiry. International Institute for Sustainable Development.

What is Appreciative Inquiry? A way of thinking, seeing and acting for purposeful change. Appreciative Inquiry works on the assumption that whatever you want more of already exists in an organisation. While traditional problem-solving processes separate and dissect pieces of a system, Appreciative Inquiry generates images that affirm the forces that give life and energy to human systems. The theory behind Appreciative Inquiry was developed in the 1970s by David Cooperrider and others at Case Western Reserve University. For a deeper look at the differences between the traditional problem diagnosis model of action research and appreciative Inquiry access an article by Joe Hall and Sue Hammond.

Bushe, G.R. 1995. Advances in Appreciative Inquiry as an Organization Development Intervention. Organization Development Journal, .13(3):14-22.Since Cooperrider & Srivastva's (1987) original article on appreciative inquiry there has been a lot of excitement and experimentation with this new form of action research. The technology of appreciative inquiry as a social research method and as an organization development (OD) intervention are evolving differently. Here I will mainly focus on it as an OD intervention. Currently there is no universally accepted method for doing an appreciative inquiry and it is premature to offer a "recipe" for how to do it. There is, however, a fairly well accepted set of parameters for distinguishing between what is and is not a legitimate appreciative inquiry. In this paper I will describe the basics of this technique and report on some innovations I and colleagues have experimented with to extend the appreciative approach. Appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987), a theory of organizing and method for changing social systems, is one of the more significant innovations in action research in the past decade. Those who created action research in the 1950s were concerned with creating a research method that would lead to practical results as well as the development of new social theory. It was hoped that action research would be an important tool in social change. A key emphasis of action researchers has been on involving their "subjects" as co-researchers. Action research was and still is a cornerstone of organization development practice. While always controversial as a scientific method of inquiry, action research has recently come under criticism as a method of organizational change and as a process for developing new theory. In their seminal paper Cooperrider & Srivastva criticize the lack of useful theory generated by traditional action research studies and contend that both the method of action research and implicit theory of social organization are to blame. The problem is that most action research projects use logical positivistic assumptions (Sussman & Evered, 1978) ,which treats social and psychological reality as something fundamentally stable, enduring, and "out there". Appreciative inquiry, however, is a product of the socio-rationalist paradigm (Gergen, 1982, 1990) which treats social and psychological reality as a product of the moment, open to continuous reconstruction. Cooperrider and Srivastva argue that there is nothing inherently real about any particular social form, no transcultural, everlasting, valid principles of social organization to be uncovered. While logical positivism assumes that social phenomena are sufficiently enduring, stable and replicable to allow for generalizations, socio-rationalism contends that social order is fundamentally unstable. "Social phenomena are guided by cognitive heuristics, limited only by the human imagination: the social order is a subject matter capable of infinite variation through the linkage of ideas and action". (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987, p.139). Socio-rationalists argue that the theories we hold, our beliefs about social systems, have a powerful effect on the nature of social "reality". Not only do we see what we believe, but the very act of believing it creates it. From this point of view, the creation of new and evocative theories of groups, organizations, and societies, are a powerful way to aid in their change and development. Like most post-modernists, Cooperrider & Srivastva argue that logical positivistic assumptions trap us in a rear-view world and methods based on these assumptions tend to (re)create the social realities they purport to be studying. Further, they argue that action researchers tend to assume that their purpose is to solve a problem. Groups and organizationsare treated not only as if they have problems, but as if they are problems to be "solved". Cooperrider and Srivastva contend that this "problem-oriented" view of organizing and inquiry reduces the possibility of generating new theory, and new images of social reality, that might help us transcend current social forms. What if, instead of seeing organizations as problems to be solved, we saw them as miracles to be appreciated? How would our methods of inquiry and our theories of organizing be different?