Defining Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative Inquiry is, essentially, a collaborative and highly participative, system wide approach to seeking, identifying and enhancing the “life-giving forces” that are present when a system is performing optimally in human, economic and organizational terms. It is a journey during which profound knowledge of a human system at its moments of wonder is uncovered and used to co-construct the best and highest future of that system.

Our use of the term “appreciative” emphasizes the idea that when something increases in value, it “appreciates.” Therefore, “appreciative inquiry” is inquiry that focuses on the generative and life-giving forces in the system that are the things we want to increase. By “inquiry” we mean the process of seeking to understand through asking questions.

As David Cooperrider writes in Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change:

“AI involves, in a central way, the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate and heighten positive potential. It centrally involves the mobilization of inquiry through the crafting of the “unconditional positive question” often involving hundreds and sometimes thousands of people.

“In AI the arduous task of intervention gives way to the speed of imagination and innovation. Instead of negation, criticism, and spiraling diagnosis, there is discovery, dream and design. AI seeks fundamentally to build a constructive union between a whole people and the massive entirety of what people talk about as 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.”

(Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005)

To give the reader a more informed context in which to consider Appreciative Inquiry, we devote this chapter to the history, theory, and research related to AI.