Appreciative inquiry

Appreciative inquiry (AI) is a model that seeks to engage stakeholders in self-determined change. According to Bushe "AI revolutionized the field of organization development and was a precursor to the rise of positive organization studies and the strengths based movement in American management." It was developed at Case Western Reserve University's department of organizational behavior, starting with a 1987 article by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva. They felt that the overuse of "problem solving" hampered any kind of social improvement, and what was needed were new methods of inquiry that would help generate new ideas and models for how to organize.

Cooperrider and Srivastva took a social constructionist approach, arguing that organizations are created, maintained and changed by conversations, and claiming that methods of organizing were only limited by people's imaginations and the agreements among them.

In 2001, Cooperrider and Diana Whitney published an article outlining the five principles of AI.

In 1996, Cooperrider, Whitney and several of their colleagues became centrally involved using AI to mid-wife the creation of the United Religions Initiative (www.uri.org), a global organization dedicated to promoting grassroots interfaith cooperation for peace, justice and healing. This early and partnership between URI and AI is chronicled in Birth of a Global Community: Appreciative Inquiry in Action by Charles Gibbs and Sally Mahé. AI was also used in the first (1999) and subsequent meetings of business leaders that created the UN's Global Compact. In another of the early applications, Cooperrider and Whitney taught AI to employees of GTE (now part of Verizon resulting in improvements in employees' support for GTE's business direction and. as a part of continuous process improvement generated both improvements in revenue collection and cost savings earning GTE an ASTD award for the best organisational change program in the US in 1997."

On May 8, 2010, Suresh Srivastva died.

Gervase Bushe, a researcher on the topic, published a 2011 review of the model, including its processes, critiques, and evidence. He also published a history of the model in 2012.

According to Bushe, AI "advocates collective inquiry into the best of what is, in order to imagine what could be, followed by collective design of a desired future state that is compelling and thus, does not require the use of incentives, coercion or persuasion for planned change to occur."

The model is based on the assumption that the questions we ask will tend to focus our attention in a particular direction, that organizations evolve in the direction of the questions they most persistently and passionately ask. In the mid 80's most methods of assessing and evaluating a situation and then proposing solutions were based on a deficiency model, predominantly asking questions such as "What are the problems?", "What's wrong?" or "What needs to be fixed?". Instead of asking "What's the problem?", others couched the question in terms of "challenges", which still focused on deficiency, on what needs to be fixed or solved. Appreciative Inquiry was the first serious managerial method to refocus attention on what works, the positive core, and on what people really care about. Today, these ways of approaching organizational change are common

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