Appreciative Inquiry (AI) and its offshoot Appreciative Living are organisational and personal development paradigms that encourage inquiring about, learning from, and building upon what is working in order to facilitate positive change. The core of AI is the notion that what you focus on expands.
Pioneered by David Cooperrider and the late Suresh Srivastva of Case Western Reserve University in the late 1980s, AI has been attracting a growing following and its principles have been successfully applied to a diverse range of organisations including Nutrimental, Hunter Douglas, GTE, Red Cross, British Airways, the United Religions Initiative and the US Navy. Appreciative Living is a programme that has adapted AI principles to personal development. Pioneered by Jackie Kelm, Appreciative Living now has registered practitioners in twelve countries.
One of the biggest criticism of AI is that it doesn't address the negatives; that it, is a form of problem-avoidance and denial. This notion can be illustrated by the following scenario: a participant returns from an AI meeting full of energy and enthusiasm only to encounter the unchanged negative “realities” of office politics, budget cuts, delays in programme implementation, and so on. The rose tinted specs are yanked off and AI is filed away as “nice but not for the real world”. In such a case either AI has been poorly facilitated or the participant was sleeping during some vital segments of the workshop. Because AI IS designed to address the negatives, but not in a way that negates the positive aspects that exist in every situation. AI cannot afford to ignore negatives because if a burning issue is not attended to it will inevitably come back to bite you!
Jackie Kelm paints the picture of our lives as a movie that constantly plays in front of us on an imaginary screen. This screen has a line going through the middle. On one side of the line are the positive things – talents, dreams, and creative ideas, to name a few. On the other side of the line are the negative things – fears, failures, weaknesses and so on.
Pioneered by David Cooperrider and the late Suresh Srivastva of Case Western Reserve University in the late 1980s, AI has been attracting a growing following and its principles have been successfully applied to a diverse range of organisations including Nutrimental, Hunter Douglas, GTE, Red Cross, British Airways, the United Religions Initiative and the US Navy. Appreciative Living is a programme that has adapted AI principles to personal development. Pioneered by Jackie Kelm, Appreciative Living now has registered practitioners in twelve countries.
One of the biggest criticism of AI is that it doesn't address the negatives; that it, is a form of problem-avoidance and denial. This notion can be illustrated by the following scenario: a participant returns from an AI meeting full of energy and enthusiasm only to encounter the unchanged negative “realities” of office politics, budget cuts, delays in programme implementation, and so on. The rose tinted specs are yanked off and AI is filed away as “nice but not for the real world”. In such a case either AI has been poorly facilitated or the participant was sleeping during some vital segments of the workshop. Because AI IS designed to address the negatives, but not in a way that negates the positive aspects that exist in every situation. AI cannot afford to ignore negatives because if a burning issue is not attended to it will inevitably come back to bite you!
Jackie Kelm paints the picture of our lives as a movie that constantly plays in front of us on an imaginary screen. This screen has a line going through the middle. On one side of the line are the positive things – talents, dreams, and creative ideas, to name a few. On the other side of the line are the negative things – fears, failures, weaknesses and so on.
 There are positives to be found in every setback. Native trees were unscathed after a massive cyclone hit the small Indian Ocean Island of Rodrigues in 2003. This demonstrated how a programme of native forest restoration could protect the island. But you would be naive to ignore the negative consequences of the storm. Photo by John Mauremootoo licensed under Creative Commons (Attribution) | The problem-solving paradigm scrutinises the negative side of the screen in order to find solutions to the articulated problems, but pays less attention to what is working. So the movie theatre curtain is pulled over the positive side of the screen. Intensive focus on what is not working can be exhausting, demoralising, demotivating and ultimately counter-productive. AI is about pulling the curtains back so that we can see the whole picture – both the positive and negative. However, the dominant paradigm in the world today is to pay more attention to the negative (if you don’t believe me just watch any news bulletin for more than ten minutes); so AI trains us to look for the positive aspects of all situations, even those that could be deemed to be overwhelmingly negative. This shift in emphasis takes a lot of practice so a single AI meeting will not be enough to “re-wire” the brain to habitually think more on the positive side. |
So assuming that AI has been “done right”, will it produce a cohort of reality-denying Pollyannas? In Jackie Kelm’s words:
The opposite is actually true. It may seem ironic, but spending time on the positive side gives you the courage, inspiration, and motivation to deal with the “bad stuff.”
A well-facilitated AI workshop can help to start you off on this positive path but ultimately it takes persistent, purposeful practice to sustain the change.
The opposite is actually true. It may seem ironic, but spending time on the positive side gives you the courage, inspiration, and motivation to deal with the “bad stuff.”
A well-facilitated AI workshop can help to start you off on this positive path but ultimately it takes persistent, purposeful practice to sustain the change.
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