APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY: SOME CRUCIAL ASSERTIONS

  • Knowledge and organizational destiny are interwoven. To be effective -- as leaders, managers, or as agents of change -- all of us must be adept in the art of understanding, reading and analyzing organizations as living human constructions. Knowing (organizations) stands at the center of any management task. The way we know is fateful.

  • The seeds of change are implicit in the first questions asked. The questions we ask set the stage for what we find, and what we find (data) becomes the material out of which the future is imagined and constructed. Since energy flows where attention goes, it is not too strong to say: the first question is fateful.

  • The most important resource we have for generating constructive organizational change is our cooperative imagination and mind (and our capacity to unleash the imagination and mind of groups) Appreciative Inquiry is a way of reclaiming our imaginal competence.

  • Unfortunately, the conventional "habitus mentalis" -- habitual styles of thought, preconscious background assumptions, root metaphors and rules of analysis by which we come to define our organizations in a particular way -- has constrained our managerial imagination and mind.

  • Our styles of thinking rarely match the increasingly complex worlds in which we work; therefore, we need to commit ourselves to the ongoing pursuit of multiple and more fruitful ways of knowing.

  • Organizations, as human constructions, are largely affirmative systems and thus are responsive to positive thought and positive knowledge.

    1. See Cooperrider, DL & Srivastva, S in "Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life" in Woodman & Pasmore (eds.) Research on Organizational Change and Development Vol.1, JAI Press, 1987

    2. See Cooperrider, DL, "Positive Image, Positive Action: The Affirmative Basis of Organizing" in Srivastva & Cooperrider & Associates, Appreciative Management and Leadership, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. 1990

    Based on Carter, Srivastva, and Cooperrider, & adapted by Royal. Revised by Stewart 1998

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    "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it 's the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead

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    Copyright 1998, 1999 Pancultural Associates, Inc. Last updated 16 May 1999