Appreciate Inquiry (AI) is the brainchild of doctoral student David Cooperrider and his advisor, Suresh Srivastva, who developed the concept during their involvement in the doctoral program in Organizational Behaviour at Case Western University1. With its accentuation of the positive, AI is a significant departure from previous experiential learning models, which tended to focus on trying to learn and adjust behaviour by reflecting on what wasn’t working.
The four stages in appreciative inquiry are:
- Discovery—identifying existing strengths
- Dreaming—describing the best possible future imaginable
- Designing—a plan for change
- Destiny—implementing the plan to realise the dream
Appreciative inquiry is typically viewed as a tool for developing and changing entire organisations. However, the underlying concepts of learning and change are also relevant to helping individual leaders develop themselves. In fact, helping a leader to link their own development to events around them is the fundamental constant of all experiential learning models. AI is different in that it provides an affirmative, forward-thinking context for your development. For example, it asks you to focus on such questions as:
- What achievements am I most proud of? What personal strengths underpin those successes?
- Where do I see myself in five years? What will I be doing? What sort of leader do I really want to be?
- How can/will I use and build on my strengths to turn this dream into a reality?
Then, as you execute your plan, you regularly reflect on what you are doing that is helping you change and how this insight can move you ever closer to your dream.
- Cooperrider, D., & Srivastva, S. (1987). Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life. Research In Organizational Change & Development, 129-169. ↩
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I have been working with Appreciative Inquiry since 1994, when the 4D model did not exist. The 4D model makes many things much harder tnat necessary. Especially if you apply it in individual learning.
David Cooperriders research was looking for the life giving factors in situations of extraordinary achievement.
The 4D model comes out of a specific case and began to become THE model. I saw it first in 1997, where Diana Whitney presented it in Denmark.
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