AI Practitioner Volume 14 Number 1 ISBN 978-1-907549-08-3 February 2012

Gervase Bushe
Professor of Leadership and Organization
Development at the Beedie School of Business, he is
one of the key researcher/practitioners of Appreciative
Inquiry. He is currently studying and writing about
‘Dialogical Organization Development’ – an attempt
to identify the underlying basis of all planned,
transformational change processes.
Contact: [email protected]

Each issue, a leading AI practitioner will present a topic of their choice

Feature Choice by Gervase Bushe

Foundations of Appreciative Inquiry:
History, Criticism and Potential

ABSTRACT I was recently asked to write an overview of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) (Bushe,
2012) and in the process of preparing that wanted to gain a clear view of its
Bushe traces the
history as viewed by the main actors at the time. My conversations with them
development of AI from can help us to understand what AI is, and can be, and free us from being locked
Cooperrider’s discovery of into the ‘4-D Model’ and the tendency to polarize ‘negative’ and ‘positive’. I will
the excitement of focusing also review some of the history of AI criticism, and end this essay with what I
think is the key controversy and potential AI faces at this moment in its history.
on what gives life to an
organization through to A brief history: the beginnings of AI
the controversies and The origin of AI can be traced to the close relationship between the doctoral
potential for AI now. program in organizational behaviour (OB) at Case Western Reserve University in
Cleveland, Ohio and the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, an esteemed health care
Key moments include
organization with facilities only a few blocks apart from each other. The doctoral
the transition of AI from program in OB at Case is unique in America in stressing both rigorous grounding
a research approach in theory and research methods, while also stressing application of theory and
to change process, method to the issues of organizational leadership and change. Many AI theorists
and researchers are graduates (e.g., Barrett, Bright, Bushe, Cooperrider,
development of the 4-D
Johnson, Ludema, Powley, Sekerka, Stavros and Thatchenkery).
model and three waves of
AI criticism. He concludes For over a decade, the Cleveland Clinic had served as a site for doctoral student
with Cooperrider’s research and consulting internships, and in 1979 a doctoral student named
David Cooperrider was employed in one such internship as part of a research
thoughts on the next
project on physician leadership.
transformational moment
in AI. As Cooperrider interviewed physician leaders throughout the organization he
became more and more excited by the organizational processes and forms of
governance that had evolved in what was a large and successful partnership
of over 300 doctors. While the study collected data on problems and issues,
Suresh Srivastva was impressed by the excitement in his young student. He
encouraged him to put the problems aside and focus on what gave life and
vitality to the organization.

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[Cooperrider] thought Based on this study Cooperrider began to develop a theory of ‘the egalitarian
organization’ (Srivastva and Cooperrider, 1986). Near the end of 1980 he
organizational studies
was asked to present the emerging themes of that study to Cleveland Clinic’s
needed new metaphors Board of Governors and put a footnote in the report that this was not focusing
that would be more on problems but looking at what gave life to an extraordinary system and so was
generative. an ‘appreciative analysis’. There was tremendous interest in that report and it
created a stir throughout the organization.

At that point it dawned on Cooperrider that his interest was shifting from issues
of organization design and functioning to the nature of inquiry. Powerfully
affected by Ken Gergen’s (1978) ideas on social research and influenced also
by Morgan’s (1980) work on the power of metaphor to shape organizational
theorizing, he thought organizational studies needed new metaphors that
would be more generative. He concluded that organization as a mystery and
miracle could provide a continuously generative metaphor. While reading an
anthology on the philosophy of art (Rader, 1979) he was struck by Rader’s
distinction between communities of interpretation (science) and communities of
appreciation (art). Why should these be separate, he wondered? Why not bring
them together? At his first presentation on the egalitarian organization at the
Academy of Management in 1984, as an aside he showed a diagram contrasting
problem solving with appreciative analysis and proposed that, instead of seeing
organizations as problems to be solved, organizations been seen as mysteries to
be appreciated. He was laughed at.

At that moment a ‘light That year he and Frank Barrett, another student working under Srivastva, were
bulb’ went off – the power engaged in an organization development (OD) project where the standard
action research feedback process was being met with a high level of conflict
of questions ... inquiry as and hostility. During a meeting amongst the three and Ron Fry (a professor), the
the engine of change – emotional baggage from their experience led them to argue with each other. As
and Appreciative Inquiry that dynamic became more uncomfortable – and unusual – Srivastva said, ‘I
was born. wonder if what is going on now is a consequence of the questions we are asking?’

At that moment a ‘light bulb’ went off – the power of questions, the deficit nature
of most questions, questions beginning the change, inquiry as the engine of
change – and Appreciative Inquiry was born. Cooperrider and Barrett went off
and reconceptualised everything they were doing with that client. They engaged
the managers in an inquiry into the best practices in another organization which
completely changed the dynamics in the system and led to major improvements
(Barrett and Cooperrider, 1990). Concurrently, Cooperrider did a survey-based,
empirical study on the impact of inquiry on social systems, which solidified his
views and became his doctoral dissertation on Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider,
1986).

The first presentation of AI as a new change philosophy

Cooperrider’s first presentation of AI to organization development (OD) scholars
and practitioners at the 1985 OD Network Conference in San Francisco argued
that problem-solving processes tended to exacerbate the problems they were
attempting to solve, and that more change could be got from focusing members’
attention on the ‘life giving properties’ of their social systems. It was my first
exposure to AI and I remember how the majority of those in attendance were
incredulous at the suggestion that they should stop focusing on problems.
It seemed too one sided. Many thought the argument that diagnosis should
be abandoned, as it simply recreated the mental models of those doing the
diagnosis, was fanciful at best.

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Appreciative Inquiry A small core of OD practitioners, however, disenchanted with how slow action
research seemed and how little change seemed to come from conventional,
did not begin life as an
participative change processes, were excited by the potential AI offered. This
organizational change change practice grounded in social constructionism promised a much higher
technique – it began as level of engagement by system members.
a research method for
A few experiments utilizing this new philosophy (for at the time it was more
making grounded theory-
a philosophy than a method) took place in the 1980s, the most significant
building more generative. of which was sponsored by John Carter of the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland.
Carter’s idea was to engage an organization with dozens of locations, in an
organization-wide inquiry involving 600 interviews in a short time span. This led
Carter to come up with the idea to train employees to interview other employees,
an innovation that has become central to many AI interventions. (Carter and
Johnson, 1999).

Research method or OD technique?

Yet, Appreciative Inquiry did not begin life as an organizational change technique;
it began as a research method for making grounded theory-building more
generative (Cooperrider, 1986; Cooperrider and Sekerka, 2006). The question
was how to do research in a way that would generate new ideas? Cooperrider
argued that new ideas are the most potent force for change, but his focus was on
inquiry, not on change. AI comes from a constructive reimagining of postmodern
philosophy.

Acknowledging that ‘objective’ research is not possible and that all social
research is inherently biased by the positioning of the researcher, Cooperrider
argued this was not a reason to give up on the pursuit of knowledge. On the
contrary, his view was that it frees us to take the idea that organizations are
made and imagined to its logical conclusion: that organizational inquiry is
simultaneously the production of self-and-world. Therefore a wide field of
creative, positive, possibility beckons us (Cooperrider, Barrett and Srivastva,
1995). Applying this insight led to the Social Innovations in Global Management
(SIGMA) research study, which was the launching ground for the evolution and
dissemination of AI.

SIGMA, social innovation and change management

SIGMA was seeded in the mid 1980s when Cooperrider met Jane Magruder
Watkins, an OD consultant with a focus on community development and
global experience, especially in Africa. She immediately embraced AI and
invited Cooperrider to work with her in South Africa. That experience left
a strong impression on him and created an interest in non-governmental
organizations (NGOs). Cooperrider had been influenced by William Whyte’s
(1982) proposal that studying social innovations might be more useful for
solving human problems than problem-solving interventions. Having recently
completed his Ph.D. and been hired onto the OB faculty at Case, Cooperrider and
another faculty member, Bill Pasmore, developed an interest in studying non-
governmental organizations as social innovations that might hold clues to new,
improved forms of organizing and change management.

Responding to a challenge from the Dean of the Management School to

identify the important managerial issues of the next century, they argued that
the key task of executive leadership was the ability to bring people, ideas and
resources together across difficult boundaries into new configurations in the

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Thatchenkery argued pursuit of practical outcomes. They further argued that successful NGOs had
the best track records at doing precisely that, and that studying them should
that truly generative
result in new insights into executive processes. They proposed using AI as the
theory could only emerge research method for such a study. Scott Cowen, the Dean, was impressed with
from engaging the whole Cooperrider’s vision and reasoning and helped acquire the initial $150,000
system in the theory to study a few NGOs and organize the conference in 1989 that launched the
SIGMA study.
building process itself.
Watkins had been instrumental in helping design that conference and a year
later was involved, with Ada Jo Mann, in trying to convince USAID that capacity
building in NGOs and private voluntary organizations (PVOs) was critical to
ensuring that aid money was being used well. They suggested enlisting the
OB department at Case to develop what became the Global Excellence in
Management (GEM) initiative. This resulted in over seven million dollars in grants
from USAID that, from 1990 to 1995, engaged more than 20 doctoral students
and faculty members in working with over 150 PVOs and NGOs. This provided
the ground for learning how to facilitate multi-stakeholder forms of inquiry and
helped spread the AI philosophy and method around the world.

Engaging the whole system

During the early SIGMA projects a doctoral student, Tojo Thatchenkery, took the
idea of building generative theory with a client system to an extreme. Up until
then, Cooperrider and his colleagues were still analyzing data collected from
Discovery as researchers, fairly independent of organizational members, and
feeding back their findings. While studying the Intercultural Affairs Institute using
AI, however, organizational members took over the data analysis process and
became fully engaged in the theory building process that emerged. Thatchenkery
argued that truly generative theory could only emerge from engaging the whole
system in the theory building process itself (Gergen and Thatchenkery, 1996;
Thatchenkery, 1994).

In 1992, Bliss Browne, a community development organizer in Chicago, began

using AI to change that city. Browne and her team launched an early AI process
that involved hundreds of thousands of appreciative interviews over many
years in Chicago (Browne and Jain, 2002). Browne’s image of doing a million
interviews stimulated Cooperrider’s imagination about what was possible and
increased his appetite for engaging systems as a whole. The ‘Imagine Chicago’
experiment went on to be copied in hundreds of communities, further spreading
AI theory and practice.

Foundation of the Taos Institute

In the early 90s another event that would have a significant impact on the
evolution and dissemination of AI was a meeting between Diana Whitney and
David Cooperrider. Whitney, a management consultant with a doctorate in
communications and an interest in social constructionism, had invited a small
group of scholars and practitioners to a meeting to discuss ways of applying the
theory to practical issues.

One of the invitees was Ken Gergen, who had met Cooperrider and Srivastva,
and, impressed by the things they were doing, invited them along. One result
of this meeting was the birth of the Taos Institute, a collection of individuals
committed to the exploration and evolution of social constructionist approaches
to personal and organizational change. Another was a partnership between

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In the late 1990s the ‘4-D Whitney and Cooperrider that resulted in a series of significant consulting
assignments where the methodology of AI as a change process coalesced into
Model’ of Appreciative the form most associated with it today.
Inquiry appeared and has
come to be so strongly Filling the void: early books on AI
associated with AI that for During the 1990s Cooperrider resisted mounting calls for him to write a book on
the methodology of AI. His belief was that the philosophy of AI was paramount,
many, it is AI. and his preference was to encourage widespread experimentation and
innovation in methods. His concern was that any book on an AI method would
lead people to lose sight of the underlying issues he was most concerned with
and stop experimentation and innovation.

The result was that others stepped in to fill the void. The first was the aptly
named Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry (Hammond, 1996), perhaps the most
widely read book on AI. Though well intentioned, the unfortunate effect was to
take a profound philosophical perspective on organizations and change and
turn it into a fairly simple set of steps focused on uncovering people’s ‘best of’
stories and somehow using those to identify change objectives. The other two
early books on the subject were by Charles Elliot (1999) and Watkins and Mohr
(2001).

Elliot’s book (he was introduced to AI by Jane Watkins while she was his doctoral
student at Cambridge) was a fairly scholarly examination of his application of
AI in community development organizations in Africa with some thoughtful
exploration of the resulting change processes, primarily from a psychoanalytic
perspective. Watkins’ and Mohr’s book was a ‘how to’ for consultants from the
instructors of National Training Laboratory’s (NTL) AI course. Jane Magruder
Watkins and Bernard Mohr’s courses in AI at NTL were instrumental in spreading
AI to the OD community and their book was widely read.

The unfortunate result of all these early books, however, was to promulgate an
image of AI as action research with a positive question (instead of diagnosing
problems, collect ‘best of’ stories and instead of problem solving, engage in
‘design’). This image continues to plague textbook descriptions of AI, academic
critiques and practitioner descriptions, and the very important distinctions
between diagnostic and dialogic approaches to change have been ignored
(Bushe and Marshak, 2009). A second consequence (and benefit) is that
approaches to AI have proliferated, and it is inaccurate to describe AI practice in
any single way.

Development of the 4-D model

In the late 1990s the ‘4-D model’ of Appreciative Inquiry appeared and has
come to be so strongly associated with AI that for many, it is AI. Prior to this,
AI practitioners had relied on the initial set of 4 principles (Cooperrider and
Srivastva, 1987) which stated that inquiry into the social potential of a social
system should begin with appreciation, be collaborative, provocative and
applicable. The original method called for a collective discovery process using

1) grounded observation to identify the best of what is

2) vision and logic to identify ideals of what might be
3) collaborative dialogue and choice to achieve consent about what should be
4) collective experimentation to discover what can be.

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Between 2001 and 2003, Most inquiries focused on what gave ‘life’ to the group or organization by asking
participants to describe the time in their organizational experience they most
books by Cooperrider
felt alive, energized and excited in that organization. These stories were then
and his colleagues ... used to create a platform for participants to identify their ideals and propose
were finally published ‘provocative propositions’, statements about how the organization should be that
containing important were intended to be inspirational but not necessarily attainable.
theoretical and practical
As the idea of Appreciative Inquiry spread and was used by more consultants,
statements. many inquiries shifted from looking at the ‘life giving properties’ to focus on
specific organizational concerns, like customer service or workplace safety.
Provocative propositions morphed from the inspirational to more attainable
Design Statements. It wasn’t until 1997 that the 4 D model solidified.
Cooperrider had used the terms affirmative topic and Discovery in his
dissertation.

In 1995, during a course lecture, Srivastva described Discovery leading to

group Dream and then group Destiny. Then in 1997, while Cooperrider was
working with a group of consultants for Save the Children in Africa, an attempt
to integrate AI with their consulting model led to the insertion of a Design phase
and the final Delivery phase and the 4D model was born which persists to this
day. A number of practitioner critiques pointed out that the 4D model omitted an
important first step in the AI process of identifying the focus of the inquiry itself.
The Clergy Leadership Institute in the U.S. suggested ‘Define’ as the first step
and some AI models refer to a 5–D model. Cooperrider’s dissertation called this
the ‘affirmative topic’ and many models have retained that label.

The millennium: AI comes into its own

The turn of the millennium saw an explosion in the use of AI, and books and
articles on the topic. Between 2001 and 2003, books by Cooperrider and his
colleagues on the theory and practice of AI were finally published containing
important theoretical and practical statements (Cooperrider, Sorensen,
Yeager and Whitney, 2001; Fry, Barrett, Seiling and Whitney, 2002; Ludema,
Whitney, Mohr and Griffen, 2003; Whitney and Trosten-Bloom, 2003). An
early participant, Anne Radford from the UK, decided in 1998 to organize a
newsletter for those interested in this new form of organization development
practice, which has developed into the quarterly publication you are reading now
(AI Practitioner), a key source for disseminating ideas and experiences with AI.
Thousands of managers and consultants attended Appreciative Inquiry courses
and it moved into the corporate mainstream.

Whitney and Trosten-Bloom (2003) identified eight ‘forms of engagement’ used

by AI practitioners. These ranged from interventions where a sole consultant or
a small representative group of people do the AI on behalf of a larger group of
people, to those where most or all of the whole system is engaged in the entire
4-D process. The majority of case studies of transformational change have been
of the latter variety (Barrett and Fry, 2005; Barros and Cooperrider, 2000;
Bushe and Kassam, 2005; Fry et. al., 2002; Ludema et. al., 2003; Ludema
and Hinrichs, 2003; Powley, Fry, Barrett and Bright, 2004) leading to an
increasing emphasis in the AI literature on widespread engagement as central to
successful AI change efforts (Bushe, in press; Cheung-Judge and Powley, 2006;
Cooperrider and Sekerka, 2006), particularly the Appreciative Inquiry Summit
(Ludema et.al, 2003; Whitney and Cooperrider, 2000).

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AI as a research method There are some voices, however, that caution against seeing AI as an ‘event’,
however large scale, and argue that it is more effective to think of AI as a long
is not interested in
term process punctuated by events (Vanstone and Dalbiez, 2008; Whitney and
discovering what is but Trosten-Bloom, 2003). They note that as much or more change comes from the
in allowing a collective to interactions that take place in the work place as people appreciatively inquire,
uncover what could be. trade stories and are impacted by new conversations (Bushe, 2001) as it does
from new ideas or plans.

Criticism of AI
Critiques of AI have become more sophisticated in recent years, overcoming
earlier criticism which came from people not very conversant with the process or
underlying theory. By and large they have questioned an exclusive focus on ‘the
positive’ and have come in three waves. The first wave came from OD scholars
who generally asserted that a balanced focus on what’s working and what’s
dysfunctional was more likely to generate a valid diagnosis than just one or the
other.

The most cogent of these came from Golembiewski (1998, 2000) who
expressed concerns that AI advocates were anti-research. Golembiewski,
operating out of a positivistic, modernist mindset, did not seem to understand
the profound shift in worldview of social constructionism that underlies AI. Social
constructionists argue that all research only makes sense within a community
of discourse and, that social science research, in particular, constructs the world
it studies. As a result, social constructionists do not believe that any theory or
method is about ‘the truth’ (including social constructionism) but, rather, that
every theory and method is a human construction that allows for some things to
be seen and done and for other things to be overlooked or unavailable.

From this point of view, AI as a research method is not interested in discovering

what is but in allowing a collective to uncover what could be. Similarly, it doesn’t
make sense to ask whether AI (or any OD method) generates valid information.
Instead, AI advocates would ask of AI (and any OD method) whose interests does
it serve and is it generative in the service of those interests?

The second wave of critiques

The next wave of critiques were, ironically, grounded in social constructionism
but described a poorly informed and simplistic understanding of AI. (e.g.,
Fineman, 2006; Grant and Humphries, 2006). Fineman’s (2006) otherwise
well-reasoned and nuanced critique of positive organizational scholarship
describes Appreciative Inquiry as ‘asking positive questions’ and based mainly
on the force of ‘positive emotions’. He doesn’t seem to recognize that advocates
of AI are just as suspicious as critical theorists ‘... about a research methodology
that claims a monopoly on the truth and that sets the knower apart from the
knowledge gleaned’ (Fineman, 2006, p. 284).

He says nothing to address those AI advocates who are suspicious of a social

theory that assumes human relations always function within a structure of
oppressor and oppressed. Critical theory provides academics with lots of
fodder for admonishing others on how they should and shouldn’t see the world,
often in a language that your average manager wouldn’t understand (e.g., Boje,
2010). Show us examples of critical-theory-driven interventions changing any
organization, or improving the world in any way, they would ask.

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Oliver argues that if AI The most recent wave

The third wave has come from scholar practitioners who seem sympathetic to
is used to stifle valid
AI but more aware of its limitations. A common concern is with the possibility
expressions of hurt, that a focus on positive stories and experiences during the discovery phase will
injustice and ill treatment, invalidate the negative organizational experiences of participants and repress
the opposite of what AI potentially important and meaningful conversations that need to take place
(Barge and Oliver, 2003; Egan and Lancaster, 2005; Fitzgerald, Oliver and
purports to do will occur.
Hoaxey, 2010; Miller, Fitzgerald, Murrell, Preston and Ambekar, 2005; Oliver,
2005a; Pratt, 2002; Reason, 2000). Pratt (2002) identified limitations in
asking participants to inquire appreciatively in systems with unexpressed
resentments. Her case study and reflections suggest that until unspoken
resentments are surfaced and expressed, participants will find Appreciative
Inquiry invalidating.

What is positive for some Oliver (2005b) takes this a step further and argues that if AI is used to stifle
valid expressions of hurt, injustice and ill treatment, the opposite of what AI
may be negative for purports to do will in fact occur; distrust, disengagement and devaluation. There
others. is little doubt that some managers and consultants have used the veneer of AI
to enforce a conversation that only allows discussion of ‘the positive’ to avoid
surfacing anxiety, incompetence or unethical issues (Bushe, 2007; Fitzgerald
et.al. 2010). This overemphasis on ‘the positive’ and suggestions for how to
ameliorate it in AI change processes have recently emerged by emphasizing
generativity (Bright, Powley, Fry & Barrett, in press; Bushe 2007, in press; Miller
et.al., 2005) and by a re-emphasis on AI as an inquiry into what gives life to
social systems (Bright & Cameron, 2009; Copperrider & Avital, 2004).

Christine Oliver (Barge and Oliver, 2003; Fitzgerald et al, 2010; Oliver, 2005a;
2005b) has provided a series of cogent arguments for thinking of AI as more
than just studying ‘the best of’ and bringing greater reflexivity to AI practice.
Barge and Oliver argue that some AI advocates paint a picture of appreciation
as manifested by managers expressing positive feedback and praise, focusing
solely on moments of excellence, success stories and the like. They argue for a
different image of appreciation in which managers make judgments about what
will be life generating and position themselves in the conversation in ways that
respect the complexity of the situation and keep conversations generative. That,
for them, means exploring vulnerabilities, fears, distress and criticism, as well as
moments of excellence.

Shadow: positive and negative

Oliver’s (2005b) critique of AI’s habit of talking about positive and negative
as having intrinsic meaning, instead of acknowledging that what is positive
for some may be negative for others, goes to the heart of the matter. Social
constructionists argue that such meanings can’t be pre-assigned by a third
party; they only emerge in relationship and even then such meanings are
multiple, partial and dynamic. It is hard to argue that such polarization doesn’t
show up with regularity in descriptions of AI, but is that really what is going on
in successful AI practice? Is it even possible to inquire into images of a positive
future without evoking the negative past or present?

Just as AI theorists argue that behind every negative image lies the positive
(Bright et al, in press), social constructionists would argue that behind every
positive image lies a negative one. Fitzgerald et.al. (2010) provide numerous
examples to suggest that AI evokes ‘shadow’. Early AI theory argued that

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‘The generative potential conversations about the best of what is or was are necessary to create an
emotional field of safety for organizational members to talk about the dreams
of AI is most likely to
that are really in their hearts (Bushe, 1995). This has been construed to mean
come from embracing that conversations about negative experiences should be avoided, and there
the polarities of human are many, unfortunately simplistic, practitioner descriptions of AI that reinforce
existence.’ Pam Johnson this image. In practice, however, the invitation to focus on the positive and the
act of remembering high points in life can evoke sadness, anger and despair –
perhaps that the current situation is not like that, perhaps that the high point
story happened so long ago, or seems so infrequent, perhaps a deep yearning for
something different from current experience is touched (Bushe, 2010).

While there is a large area of agreement between those coming out of the Case
school of AI and Barge and Oliver’s position, particularly with the recent addition
of analogic modes of Appreciative Inquiry (Bright et.al. in press), the idea that
inquiry into deficit experiences is rarely generative is foundational to the birth of
AI. Does inquiry into distress create more distress, or is it just the way we inquire
into distress that makes it so? Is it possible to inquire into distress in a way that
elevates and activates positive action? The work of Pam Johnson (in press)
suggests it is.

The creative tension of polarities

Johnson’s exploration of the dilemmas faced in her AI practice is perhaps the
most beautiful, and certainly the most personal, AI article I’ve read. Johnson
explores the many ways casting an appreciative eye can generate ‘negative’
experiences and how, in turn, exploring those experiences appreciatively can
result in ‘positive’, generative, outcomes. She acknowledges the dilemma at
the heart of the Appreciative Inquiry project: ‘AI could only be differentiated
by using the language of deficit discourse to define the problem that AI would
solve’ (Johnson, in press). By polarizing AI and problem-solving, an either/or
dynamic was set that continues to manifest in descriptions of AI. AI is described
as a method of change that doesn’t focus on problems, but research suggests
transformational change will not occur from AI unless it addresses problems of
real concern to organizational members (Bushe, 2010a). Rather than staying
stuck in a dualistic, either/or discourse of positive or negative, Johnson argues
that the generative potential of AI is most likely to come from embracing the
polarities of human existence and that it is the tensions of those very forces that
most give life and vitality to organizations.

Potential of AI
While Cooperrider would not disagree with Johnson’s nuanced and sensitive
exploration of light and shadow, he is suspicious of the nagging desire to bring
deficit-based theories of change back into play:

‘I think we are still on this quest for a full blown non-deficit theory of change.
I’m not saying that the other isn’t a way of change but I am saying that we are
still in our infancy in understanding non-deficit, strength-based or life-centric
approaches to change. William James called for it back in 1902, in Varieties
of Religious Experience, when he said we know a lot about the kind of change
that happens when people feel threatened, feel fear and violence is coming at
them, but we don’t know much about the kind of change that happens when,
in his words, “everything is hot and alive within us and everything reconfigures
itself around it”. Whether someone would call the initiating experience “positive”
or “negative”, the transformational moment is a pro-fusion moment when

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something so deeply good and loving is touched in us that everything is changed

– that’s the kind of change I’m talking about… I don’t think we really understand
the possibilities in that kind of change yet and we aren’t going to understand
them until we take this to the extremes’ (personal correspondence, March 30,
2010).

Conclusion
Regrettably, this history is North American centric, as that is where I live and
work, and I don’t know about the ways in which AI has moved through the
rest of the world. As well, this history does not consider all the innovations in
leadership and organizational practices that have been sparked by Appreciative
Inquiry. I hope it does serve, however, to remind us that AI is more a point
of view than a method. Its power as a change method depends on avoiding
dogmatism and adherence to any particular model and, instead, allowing for
an ongoing generative conversation amongst practitioners and researchers.
How do we find ways to talk about this ‘transformational, pro-fusion moment’
without polarization of negative versus positive and problem-solving versus
appreciation? I believe that is the most generative conversation we can now
have, and having it will ensure the history of AI is still being lived.

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