Appreciative Enquiry: Learning by Focusing on the Positive

Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) has been around since the late 1980’s in the world of organizational change and development. The AI approach was developed by David Cooperrider, together with Suresh Srivastva. Cooperrider’s dissertation, “Appreciative Inquiry Into Organizational Life”, is cited as the genesis point of the theory as used in the modern workplace.

Where many traditional approaches to organizational change start by looking at problems (or even pain points) in an organization, the AI approach inverts this and adopts a strengths based approach. It begins by examining what an organization does well and how it can build on those successes.

The Approach

Appreciative Inquiry as a process or approach to change typically revolves around four key stages, often referred to as the “4-D Cycle”: Discover, Dream, Design, and Destiny. These stages are completed in order, building upon their predecessors.

Some practitioners, including us, add an extra D to the cycle resulting in a “5-D Cycle”: Definition, Discover, Dream, Design, and Destiny.

1 – Definition:

At the first stage, the change team gain clarity and define the scope of the work they are looking to do. What is the subject of the inquiry to be, and why. This helps ensure a target and explainable focus for the change programme. It’s also a helpful and pragmatic step for obtaining sponsorship engagement, sign-off and funding, etc.

2 – Discovery:

The discovery phase is where the appreciative and strengths based approach really takes off. At this stage, practitioners work with participants from the organization to appreciatively inquire into the focus area for the project.

For example, if you’re focusing on recruitment, this stage of the project work would involve appreciatively inquiring into the recruitment process to understand what works well in relation to that process.

This could be done through focus-groups, workshops, surveys, observations or other approaches that help surface stories and examples of what the organization is doing when it creates the best recruitment experiences.

Everything that is discovered at this stage is captured into a set of artifacts and stories exemplifying the positive, inspiring and true stories of what the organization is like when it is at its best.

3 – Dream:

The dream phase then goes one step further. In this phase, participants are asked to envision the organization as if the peak moments identified in the Discovery phase were the norm rather than the exception.

This visioning process is not just about hopes and aspirations; it’s about grounding these dreams in the actual capacities of the organization. It’s about building on the current best-in-class performance in the organization and bringing it into life as more of a potential reality for the future.

4 – Design:

The design phase is a bit more traditional from a change perspective and involves planning and prioritizing the steps and actions that need to be implemented to bring the design into reality.

Typically in a project using an AI approach, this would involve co-creation with the participants, and all the benefits brough by that approach.

5 – Destiny:

While destiny is a pretty inspiring name for this stage, in project management speak it could just as easily be called the delivery phase.

In this phase, the project team (often collaboratively using participants from within the AI process) works to implement the co-created plan of actions to actually change the organization / team / process etc from its old form to the newly imagined dream.

What’s the evidence say?

The theory is that by approaching change with a positive psychological focus on strengths, opportunities and potential, that engagement, optimism, motivation, aspiration and performance will be higher, resulting in more effective and sustainable change.

The evidence seems to suggest that this hypothesis is correct. There is a fairly robust body of evidence demonstrating that taking an AI approach can lead to significant improvements within organizations. In addition, it’s been shown that adopting an AI approach can itself lead to increases in creativity and problem solving within the change approach (which is in line with some of the benefits associated with positive psychology more widely).

It’s also worth noting that the AI approach has been successfully used by a wide range or organizations who have reported significant improvements in culture, engagement, wellbeing and motivation as a result.

It’s worth checking out a bit more on positive thinking, which AI is anchored in, as well as celebrating success, which is also anchored in positive psych.

Re leading change generally – it’s worth checking out the Kotter Model, and you can see how we think several process models of change are related as well. 

It might be worth checking out De Bono’s hats as well, which explores how different approaches to thinking about things can help with problem solving.

We quite like taking a positive thinking approach to a lot of the work that we do and we find that Appreciative Inquiry is a helpful framing for work like that.

In addition, we typically find that clients respond pretty well to the model when we share it with them, particularly as there is such a nice evidence base and history behind it. It’s pretty simple and easy to explain too, which always helps as well.

We don’t have much more to add – we just think it’s a nice model to have in your change tool-kit / facilitation approaches.

Cooperrider, D. L., & Whitney, D. (2005). Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

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