Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative Inquiry is about the search for the best in people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them. It involves systematic discovery of what gives “life” to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most capable of achievement in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI involves the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential AI draws on the speed of imagination and innovation; instead of negation, criticism, and spiraling diagnosis, there is discovery, dream, and design. AI seeks builds on constructive insights into past and present capacities: achievements, assets, unexplored potentials, innovations, strengths, elevated thoughts, opportunities, benchmarks, high point moments, lived values, traditions, strategic competencies, stories, expressions of wisdom, insights into the deeper corporate spirit or soul-- and visions of valued and possible futures. Taking all of these together as a gestalt, AI deliberately, in everything it does, seeks to work from accounts of this “positive change core”
—and it assumes that every living system has many untapped and rich and inspiring accounts of the positive. Link the energy of this core directly to any change agenda and changes never
thought possible are suddenly and democratically mobilized.

	Appreciative Inquiry
	Appreciative Inquiry is a process based on the theory that deliberately making positive assumptions about people, organizations and relationships transforms all three. It celebrates the best in individuals and groups. Human beings are hard-wired to accentuate the negative. Because our central nervous system evolved under the fight or flight conditions faced by our primate ancestors on the savannas of Africa and because there are plenty of things to be anxious about in our everyday existence, most of us are very good at finding things to be worried about and we are equally “good” at discounting the posative. Our negativity bias has tremendous consequences for our organizations. Many of us, much of the time, are tuning into what’s not working rather than appreciating what is. This tends to make working life much less life sustaining than it can and should be. In fact, our innate pessimism has led social scientists to conclude that five authentic appreciative statements are needed to counteract the impact of one critical or negative one. Appreciative Inquiry is one method Art of the Future uses to redress the consequences of living in organizational environments where fault-finding is second nature. Anika trained in Appreciative Inquiry with David Cooperrider, the creator of the concept, and his colleagues Judy Rogers and Marge Shiller.
	Appreciative Inquiry is about the search for the best in people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them. It involves systematic discovery of what gives “life” to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most capable of achievement in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI involves the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential AI draws on the speed of imagination and innovation; instead of negation, criticism, and spiraling diagnosis, there is discovery, dream, and design. AI seeks builds on constructive insights into past and present capacities: achievements, assets, unexplored potentials, innovations, strengths, elevated thoughts, opportunities, benchmarks, high point moments, lived values, traditions, strategic competencies, stories, expressions of wisdom, insights into the deeper corporate spirit or soul-- and visions of valued and possible futures. Taking all of these together as a gestalt, AI deliberately, in everything it does, seeks to work from accounts of this “positive change core” —and it assumes that every living system has many untapped and rich and inspiring accounts of the positive. Link the energy of this core directly to any change agenda and changes never thought possible are suddenly and democratically mobilized. Paraphrased from an excerpt from A Positive Revolution in Change: Appreciative Inquiry by David L. Cooperrider, and his colleague, Diana Whitney, at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University,
	Appreciative Teamwork: It’s Important to Make it Happen A Mutual Commitment to Success
	Art of the Future offers a one day workshop in Appreciative Inquiry Workshop for in-tact teams.

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