Advances in Appreciative Inquiry

Drawing on recent, successful experience in Nepal, this paper traces the use of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) in designing roles, structures, and processes to support the engagement of private-sector businesses and non-profit civic organizations in a peace-building response to the collapse of governance and the Maoist insurgency. Specific case illustrations are offered including: the design of grassroots peace building and development organizations; the need for continual redesign; the power of populist design; the positive design lens for micro-business and post-conflict development in Africa; and the positive design lens in global business. The paper concludes by asking what might be learned from this experience that might bring new hope to Africa, the Middle East, and other troubled corners of the globe. Some of the most important lessons identified include: (1) focusing information-gathering and decision-making conversations on the positive, on the successful, and on what works in resolving conflicts and promoting collaborative understanding, (2) designing conversations which identify windows of opportunity to build success on success, (3) creating dialogical structures which illuminate positive deviation and highlight exceptional experiences that have contributed to building trust, enhancing communications, resolving conflicts, and bridging cultures and viewpoints, and (4) streamlining social design processes such as AI, so that people at all levels can embrace them quickly, easily, and enthusiastically to bring about rapid and positive change.

M ODELLJR

B MOHR

Advances in appreciative inquiry

The power of a positive lens in peace building and development

积极视角在和平建设与发展中的力量

Images and ideals of organization design have changed dramatically in the past decade in response to the need for a redirection in the purpose and strategy as well as leadership styles following the global economy, new brave networked world, emerging new forms of organizing, and social innovations. This chapter is an invitation to explore a new genre of organization design and organizing as if life matters. It is a call to embrace organizations designed to affirm, nurture, and sustain life. The chapter discusses two key questions: “What Gives Life to Human Organizing” and “What Are We Designing.” The first part aims to uncover what gives life to human organizing through an exploration of nine principles of appreciative organizing. The second part aims to expand what we mean when we talk about organization design through an examination of six fundamental structures that seem to be at play in organized action.

Diana Whitney

Designing organizations as if life matters: Principles of appreciative organizing

设计组织如同生命重要：欣赏性组织的原理

Given the dramatic changes taking place in society, the economy, and technology, 21st-century organizations need to engage in new, more spontaneous, and more innovative ways of managing. I investigate why an increasing number of companies are including artists and artistic processes in their approaches to strategic and day-to-day management and leadership.

Nancy J. Adler

The arts and leadership: Now that we can do anything, what will we do?

艺术与领导力：既然我们可以做任何事，我们将做什么？

This chapter discusses how the special qualities of poetic language can inform new principles for organizational design. Appreciative inquiry makes extensive use of poetic language – of stories, metaphors, and imagery – to facilitate the discovery of high-point experiences and the articulation of desired future states. It is commonly believed that through this narrative mode of knowing, appreciative dialogue awakens the imaginative and relational possibilities for successful transformation of organizational systems. In a critique of current practice, the chapter suggests that the unleashed generative capacity for change is not fully utilized because of appreciative inquiry's reliance on logico-scientific discourse during its design conversations. This return to modernist managerial practice is unfortunate, if we accept the need for alternative ways of knowing and talking in our efforts to create more just and sustainable forms of organizing. In an attempt to renew existing thinking, the chapter explores the question of what becomes possible when we embrace the poetics, rather than the pragmatics, of organizational design. It describes four qualities of poetic language – imaginative, ambiguous, touching, and holistic – which may inspire the design of organizations that are both more daring and caring in character.

Danielle P. Zandee

The poetics of organizational design: How words may inspire worlds

组织设计的美学：言辞如何激发世界

The emergence of strengths-based management may be the management innovation of our time. Nearly every organization has been introduced to its precepts – for example, the insight that a person or organization will excel only by amplifying strengths, never by simply fixing weaknesses. But in spite of impressive returns, organizations and managers have almost all stopped short of the breakthroughs that are possible. With micro tools largely in place, the future of strengths management is moving increasingly to the macro-management level, as witnessed in the rapid and far-reaching use of large group methods such as the Appreciative Inquiry Summit and its next generation design-thinking summit. Macro means whole and, by definition, unites many improbable opposites – for example, it embraces top down and bottom up simultaneously. It is a prime time source of organizational generativity. But the rules of macro-management are different than any other kind, most certainly micro-management. A decade of research and successful prototyping with single organizations, regions and cities, extended enterprises, industries, and UN-level world summits reveals five “X” factors – a specific set of mutually reinforcing elements of success and organizational generativity – and provides a clear set of guidelines for when and how you can deploy the “whole system in the room” design summit to bring out the best in system collaboration. By analyzing the performance and impacts of six case studies of the “whole system in the room” Appreciative Inquiry design summit, this chapter provides a bird’s eye view of the opportunities, challenges, and exciting new vistas opening up in this the collaborative age – a time when systemic action and macro-management skill are the primary leverage points for game-changing innovation, scalable solutions, and generative organizing. The chapter concludes with a call for more research into the stages of large group dynamics and advances a metaphor from the leadership literature – the spark, the flame, and the torch – to give imagery to the “positive contagion” and “the concentration effect of strengths” that happens during an Appreciative Inquiry Summit where 100s and sometimes 1000s come together interactively and collaboratively to design the future.

David L. Cooperrider

The Spark, the Flame, and the Torch: The Positive Arc of Systemic Strengths in the Appreciative Inquiry Design Summit

火花、火焰与火炬：欣赏式探询设计峰会中的系统优势积极轨迹

Transformative innovation is a particular manifestation of generativity that emerges when organizations explore the intersection of business and society, embracing social, environmental, ethical, or similar initiatives as an integral part of their strategic missions. The chapter reports findings from the World Inquiry, a search for stories of transformative innovation. The stories illustrate how transformative innovation may (1) extend mutually beneficial outcomes of activity to business and society, (2) increase the scale of enacted human strengths, and (3) invoke a deep shift in values, assumptions, and behaviors that guide an organization. The exploration of transformative inquiry demonstrates how generativity emerges when business strategies integrate the interests of multiple stakeholders.

David S. Bright

Ronald E. Fry

Exploring Transformative Innovation Through a World Inquiry

通过世界探究探索变革性创新

Anyone who engages with ideas in the context of everyday work is engaged in idea work. Building on Jung’s psychological theory of types, we theorize about the fundamental processes underlying one’s generative capacity, and in turn, one’s ability to generate ideas and engage effectively in idea work. Moreover, we provide further insights regarding creativity and innovation in everyday work practices as well as discuss considerations for the design of environments and tools that are conducive to idea work.

Michel Avital

Wietske van Osch

The Generative Archetypes of Idea Work

创意工作的生成原型

This chapter is motivated by the author’s desire to show that appreciative inquiry (AI) has developed over the course of its history by responding to client needs, gradually enlarging the scope of its capabilities, tracing the evolution of AI from a strengths-based approach into a catalyst for flourishing and wholeness. The purpose is to share how AI has inspired the business community to embrace generative language and increase awareness of the larger system in which it operates. The chapter reviews a series of cases – including Rava Packaging (to incorporate sustainability), Nutrimental Foods (a whole system intervention), Telefonica (to increase employee commitment), and the São Paulo State Federation of Industries (to support Millennium Development Goals) – in which the author and others facilitated. The interventions involved positive dialogue and appreciative interviewing. Through its capacity for generativity, AI has created greater commitment to and engagement within organizations, stronger collaboration among multiple stakeholders that benefits business and society, and deeper and lasting commitment to profound transformation in service of flourishing. The chapter contributes to a better understanding of how, at each stage in its evolution, AI has supported business by helping to expand its positive narrative and helping organizations become agents for world benefit.

Ilma Barros-Pose

The Evolution of Appreciative Inquiry: A Novel Approach in the Making

欣赏式探询的演变：一种新兴方法的探索

Social movements can create profound change in social systems. These movements are often, however, based on grievances and use contentious strategies to achieve their objectives. This study examines two movements that were started using Appreciative Inquiry. These “appreciative movements” are contrasted with a typical, grievance-based social movement. Five attributes of appreciative social movements are proposed, and contrasted with contentious social movements. Appreciative movements are based on aspirations, not grievances; collective responsibility, not blame; use of instead of conflict with existing social structures; collaborative instead of contentious methods of change; and co-optation by the mobilized instead of by elites. These attributes show the possibility from positive forms of mass mobilization, and highlight the potential impact from integrating research and practice on social movements and Appreciative Inquiry.

Publication Information	Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing Ltd.，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: book-series，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: 2013，Proportion of original research papers: ，Self Citation Rate:， Gold OA Rate:

Advances in Appreciative Inquiry

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The power of a positive lens in peace building and development

Designing organizations as if life matters: Principles of appreciative organizing

The arts and leadership: Now that we can do anything, what will we do?

The poetics of organizational design: How words may inspire worlds

The Spark, the Flame, and the Torch: The Positive Arc of Systemic Strengths in the Appreciative Inquiry Design Summit

The Spark, the Flame, and the Torch: The Positive Arc of Systemic Strengths in the Appreciative Inquiry Design Summit

Exploring Transformative Innovation Through a World Inquiry

The Generative Archetypes of Idea Work

The Evolution of Appreciative Inquiry: A Novel Approach in the Making

Generative Mobilization: Appreciative Social Movements