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InSpiral Pathways
Aligning passion & process to facilitate positive change 
in international, organisational, & personal development

Appreciative Inquiry - Denial by any other name?

2/7/2013

2 Comments

 
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.
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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. 
2 Comments
Jim Hughes
30/10/2015 12:05:24 am

John,
This is an excellent perspective which illuminates what happened in my workplace when I returned from AI training all enthusiastic about focusing on the positive. As you discussed, the perspective of AI does not deny the negative but rather offers tools to pull folks together to be the change they want. One key insight for me is that AI is a way of looking at the world that I must practice and internalize rather than a prescription for change in an organization.

Reply
John Mauremootoo link
2/11/2015 04:32:27 pm

Hi Jim,

Thanks for your comment. I completely agree with you that AI is a way of looking at the world. And it is certainly not a denial of the "negative" although that this "shadow process" can unfold unless we are vigilant (see Fitzgerald, Oliver and Hoxsey's (2010) paper on "AI as a Shadow Process" for more details). I got things badly wrong with my gratitude practice which I wrote about in my blog "How I messed up my daily gratitude practice - Walking the tightrope between expressing appreciation and kidding ourselves." Luckily my wonderful wife Julie (appreciatively) helped to show me the errors of my ways and I now have no doubt that AI-inspired tools can be nothing short of revolutionary if used consistently and conscientiously. Nowadays, when I lead introductory AI workshops I like to highlight the "power of negative thinking" early on in the session. I go over this in my blog: "Appreciative Inquiry and the Power of Negative Thinking."

Regarding returning to work following AI training and finding that nobody is quite as enthusiastic as you are, I look at it as "post-euphoric re-entry syndrome." You are so pumped up to implement what you experienced but those you return to only get a small glimpse of this experience. One way to spread the word is to organise a short workshop at your place of work. To maximise its effectiveness, of course, you need to have the boss on board.

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    John Mauremootoo

    John Mauremootoo is a consultant with over 20 years of experience in diverse aspects of international development.

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