OD Practitioner, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp.30-35, 2007.
Gervase R. Bushe, Ph.D.
Segal Graduate School of Business Simon Fraser University bushe@sfu.ca
August 2007
One thing that concerns me about the current excitement and interest in appreciative inquiry (AI) is that many of the consultants and managers I talk to who claim to be doing AI don’t seem to understand the importance of generativity, as an input and an outcome, of AI. Many people seem to get blinded by the “positive stuff”. After years of focusing on problems and deficits and dysfunction they get entranced with “focusing on the positive” and equate this with AI, but I don’t think that is the core of appreciative inquiry. Instead, the core of AI is generativity (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987). One of the central sources that influenced the creation of AI was Kenneth Gergen’s (1978) paper “Toward Generative Theory” where he argued that the most important thing social science can do is give us new ways to think about social structures and institutions that lead to new options for action. AI can be generative in a number of ways. It is the quest for new ideas, images, theories and models that liberate our collective aspirations, alter the social construction of reality and, in the process, make available decisions and actions that weren’t available or didn’t occur to us before. When successful, AI generates spontaneous, unsupervised, individual, group and organizational action toward a better future. My research suggests that when AI is transformational it has both these qualities: it leads to new ideas, and it leads people to choose new actions (Bushe, in press; Bushe & Kassam, 2005). Maybe we should start calling it Generative Inquiry.
There are many considerations, beside a focus on the positive, that go into crafting an effective appreciative inquiry. In this article I want to explore what “the positive” is reallyabout and what is required for an appreciative inquiry to be generative and therefore, transformational – something quite different from the image that has been perpetuated of AI as action research with a positive question. First, I’ll give an example of what I mean by transformational change and contrast that with another AI intervention that was a dismal failure, making the point that simply getting people to tell their “best of” stories may not accomplish much. Then I’ll look at what a focus on the positive can do for AI: 1) it can support generative thinking, 2) it can support the change process, and 3) it can make “planned” culture change possible. Next I’ll describe some things I’ve learned help make AI generative: 1) generative questions, 2) generative conversations and 3) generative actions. I’ll conclude by pointing out that many of the same consulting issues and contingencies that effect traditional OD effect Appreciative Inquiry too. AI does not magically overcome poor sponsorship, poor communications, insensitive facilitation or un-addressed organizational politics.
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