CHAPTER 2
Appreciative Inquiry: History, Theory, and Practice
“As I considered the importance of language and how human beings interact with the world, it struck me that in many ways the development of language was like the discovery of fire—it was such an incredible primordial force. I had always thought that we used language to describe the world—now I was seeing that this is not the case. To the contrary, it is through language that we create the world, because it’s nothing until we describe it. And when we describe it, we create distinctions that govern our actions. To put it another way, we do not describe the world we see, but we see the world we describe.”
Joseph Jaworski, Synchronicity
SUSTAINABLE TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE IN HUMAN SYSTEMS is the Holy Grail of organization development and the focus of this book. Appreciative Inquiry represents a radical shift in how human systems, particularly complex organizations, can pursue this goal. This chapter will provide an operational definition of Appreciative Inquiry and an overview of the theory and research base that underlie AI, that is, social constructionism and the power of image. This chapter also describes what we mean by transformative change in complex organizations and outlines the challenges of such change.
Subsequent chapters describe in more detail the phases and processes that are core to an AI-based change process, as well as the “mechanics” of the early steps.