Appreciative Inquiry

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A Positive Revolution in Change:
Appreciative Inquiry
David L. Cooperrider and Diana Whitney
(Draft)

Introduction
Appreciative Inquiry (AI) begins an adventure. The urge and call to adventure has been
sounded by many people and many organizations, and it will take many more to fully
explore the vast vistas that are now appearing on the horizon. But even in the first steps,
what isbeing sensed is an exciting direction in our language and theories of change—an
invitation, as some have declared, to “a positive revolution”.
The words just quoted are strong and, unfortunately, they are not ours. But the more we
replay, for example, the high-wire moments of our several years of work at GTE the
more we find ourselves asking the very same kinds of questions the people of GTEasked
their senior executives: “Are you really ready for the momentum that is being generated?
This is igniting a grassroots movement…it is creating an organization in full voice, a
center stage for the positive revolutionaries!”
Tom White, President of what was then called GTE Telops (making up 80% of GTE’s
67,000 employees) replies back, with no hesitation: “Yes, and what I see in thismeeting
are zealots, people with a mission and passion for creating the new GTE. Count me in,
I’m your number one recruit, number one zealot”. People cheer.
Enthusiasms continue, and they echo over subsequent months as lots of hard work pays
off. Fourteen months later --based on significant and measurable changes in stock prices,
morale survey measures, quality/customer relations, union-managementrelations, etc.-GTE’s whole system change initiative is given professional recognition by the American
Society for Training and Development. It wins the 1997 ASTD award for best
organization change program in the country. Appreciative inquiry is cited as the
“backbone”.
How Did They Do It?
This paper provides broad update and overview of AI. The GTE story mentioned at the
outset is, in manyways, just beginning but it is scarcely alone. In the ten years since the
theory and vision for “Appreciative Inquiry Into Organizational Life” was published
(Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987; Cooperrider 1986) there have been literally hundreds
of people involved in co-creating new practices for doing AI, and for bringing the spirit

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and methodology of AI into organizations allover the world.1 The velocity and largely
informal spread of the ideas suggests, we believe, a growing sense of disenchantment
with exhausted theories of change, especially those wedded to vocabularies of human
deficit, and a corresponding urge to work with people, groups, and organizations in more
constructive, positive, life-affirming, even spiritual ways.
In this paper we hope to serve asconduit to this impulse as we touch on exciting
examples and concepts, and provide references for future study. And while the outcomes
and illustrations we have selected are often dramatic, we do want to emphasize,
throughout, that AI is clearly only in its infancy. Questions are many, and we believe they
will be a source of learning for many years.
Could it be, for example, that we as a fieldhave reached “the end of problem solving” as
a mode of inquiry capable of inspiring, mobilizing and sustaining significant human
system change? What would happen to our change practices if we began all of our work
with the positive presumption—that organizations, as centers of human relatedness, are
“alive” with infinite constructive capacity? If so how would we know? What do we
mean byinfinite capacity? What would happen to us, lets say as leaders or catalysts of
change, if we approached the question of change only long after we have connected with
people and organizations through systematic study of their already “perfect” form? How
would we talk about “it”—this account of the ideal-in-the-real? Would we, in our work,
have to go any further once we and others were connected...