Appreciative Inquiry in a Pandemic: An Improbable Pairing

David L. Cooperrider https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7433-4642 and Ronald Fry [email protected] all authors

and affiliations
Volume 56, Issue 3
https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886320936265
 Contents
o Harnessing Appreciative Inquiry for Deeply Developmental OD
o Appreciative Inquiry in a Broken World
o A Time for Embracing the Change Paradox
o Declaration of Conflicting Interests
o Funding
o ORCID iD
o Footnotes
o References
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The COVID-19 pandemic has irrevocably transformed economies all over the globe, infected millions, and has
tragically caused large numbers of deaths. Institutional leaders must react to disrupted supply chains, enable
remote workforces, break bad news to employees and families, as well as maintain their own hope and energy
so they can continue to serve, guide, and move forward without any trusted roadmap. Amid this unpredictable
emergence, we are grateful to The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science Editors for the opportunity to share
thoughts on why and how appreciative inquiry (AI) can be of help.1
To begin, let us recognize that it is in times of disruption the best in human systems can burst forth. Resilience,
grit, and care for others, for example, can grow. Values can come alive and be intensely lived. To be sure, in the
immediate or near term, resilience is existentially crucial. And for longer term, we know this from years of
research on organizational culture: corporate cultures are almost totally tested and forged in the crucible of
crises, during the most challenging times of external adaptation and internal integration (Schein, 1983). How
leaders lead during times of catastrophe has an outsized effect on the future of organizational identity, collective
confidence, resilience, and corporate value congruence. Moreover, while it may seem a luxury to talk about
organization development (OD) during a major dislodgement like this, that is exactly what leaders need to do.
Harnessing Appreciative Inquiry for Deeply Developmental OD
AI is about the search for what gives life to people, their organizations, and the opportunity-saturated world
around them. In its broadest focus, “AI” involves systematic discovery of everything that supports a system
when it is most vibrant in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI involves, in a very artful and disciplined
way, the craft of asking questions that elevate a system’s cooperative capacity to apprehend strengths and
positive potentials, unite around greater meanings and shared goals, and activate the kind of generative designs
that serve to open those systems to better and more valued possibilities (Barrett & Fry, 2005; Cooperrider,
2013). AI often involves the mobilization of enterprise-wide inquiry through the crafting of discovery, dream,
and design oriented questions, involving hundreds or even thousands of stakeholders in mutual collaboration
and cocreation, whether face-to-face, on Zoom, or in digital cyberspace.
In AI, our basic assumptions or metaphors matter. From its earliest articulation (Cooperrider, 1985), AI took the
stance that human systems are not inert machines or mechanistic “problems-to-be-solved.” That kind of
metaphor often leads us to certain remedial or deficit-inclined interventions with less than favorable results
(Hammel & Zanini, 2014). Instead, AI chooses to embrace “the miracle of life on this planet,” whereby human
organizations, as living systems, are viewed as relationally alive “universes of strengths.” In Peter Drucker’s
more managerial terms, the purpose of organizing is “making strengths effective.” Indeed, in one of our
privileged meetings with Drucker—it was when he wanted to hear more about the rapid growth of AI as a
second generation OD action research modality—he said, “well I wrote about it many years ago. . . . The task of
leadership is ageless in its essence; the task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths in ways that
make a system’s weaknesses irrelevant.”
In practice, AI has built on this this strength-based premise and has drawn on the science of positive psychology
to help understand why AI has been so powerful in large-scale OD efforts. One of the significant findings is that
the study of optimal human system states does not just signal what enables thriving, peak performance, or full
spectrum flourishing. That is only part of the story. The bigger story is that optimal states—and the study
thereof—actually propel and empower even more change capacity. They generate upward spirals. In our studies
at Apple, the U.S. Navy, the remarkable growth of the United Nations Global Compact, and with companies,
such as Tata, IBM, and Microsoft, we have discovered that the OD efforts that rise above the norm excel by
amplifying strengths, never by simply fixing weaknesses (Cooperrider, 2012). Moreover, numerous lab and
field studies show that there may be a crucial generativity ratio between focusing on strengths versus deficits. A
natural field study of 10 major enterprise-wide change efforts ended up having clusters or groupings of
mediocre change efforts in comparison with a set of other organization-wide change initiatives that exceeded
expected outcomes. What was the differentiator? The researcher discovered something of an 80\20 rule. The
study showed that instead of focusing 80% on what is not working and 20% on strengths, that the most
exceptional change efforts put this deficit-leaning 80/20 tendency into a radical reverse (Robson, 2015). The
study, with over 54,000 data points, demonstrated that there was at least +4:1 ratio in the more strength-focused,
and ultimately, highest performing change initiatives. Moreover, this general finding is consistent with the
empirical evidence in over a dozen other scientific studies on realizing our higher potentials (cf. Fredrickson &
Joiner, 2002).
Interestingly, this research has also opened up what we believe are important critiques of AI. For example, is AI
simply about looking at the world through rose tinted glasses, or is it so overly biased toward the “positive” that
it ignores difficult, painful, conflicting, or even catastrophic realities? And in terms of the debilitating
reverberations of this pandemic—looming bankruptcies, organizations filled with toxic stress and fear, and
tough decision making often behind closed doors—Isn’t it an oxymoron to be appreciative while experiencing
unprecedented states of angst and disruption?
We would like to address this line of critique while asserting our confidence in this: AI might just reach its
highest potential for impact in organizations and human systems in the midst of pandemic, crisis, or tragedy. In
our very recent pilots—in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic with leaders at Progressive, Swagelok, and the
Cleveland Clinic—we are witnessing more deeply developmental OD dialogues than we ever anticipated. 2
Appreciative Inquiry in a Broken World
In a new book on building resilience with AI, a pyramid-like model of AI was built that is useful here. It
portrays three levels of AI from the least to most profound, from its easiest levels to its more mature and more
complex enactment (Cooperrider, 2018). Figure 1 illustrates our experiences with AI, from easiest to most
profound.
Figure 1. Levels of appreciative inquiry (AI).OPEN IN VIEWER
At the lowest rung—and perhaps the easiest and earliest domain to practice AI—is the AI into the
extraordinary, the best in human experience, those moments of “positive deviance” that literally take us way
above the average. AI into the extraordinary is the simplest in terms of awakening the appreciative eye. At the
second and more difficult rung, is the capacity to do AI during times of the ordinary—at those times that are so
taken-for-granted that we often fail to apprehend, appreciate, or even attempt to search for everything that is
giving life to those scenes we are so accustomed to. Here, we are talking about the capacity for seeing the life-
giving dynamic in those seemingly ordinary and insignificant events, where there are no starbursts, no
mountaintop experiences. Thank goodness, then, for the example of our artists, the ways they see, and the many
layers of meaning that they help each one of us see and appreciate. Consider how Vincent van Gogh helps us
see the extraordinary in an ordinary tea cup, or in a simple and unpretentious vase of flowers. William
Wordsworth, as another example of this second level of appreciative maturity, encourages the cultivation of
appreciative intelligence in the midst of the ordinary. He writes, “While with an eye made quiet by the power/of
harmony, and deep power of joy/we see into the life of things” (Wordsworth, 2003, p. 236). At the top of the
pyramid there is a third developmental level for the practice of AI—and it’s the least understood. This is the
kind of AI sensitivity, skill, or literacy as lived by someone such as Victor Frankel, evidenced in his enduring
classic “Man’s Search for Meaning.” This third level of elevated AI capacity is not an AI into moments of
excellence nor is it about meaning making in the ordinary, but AI in the midst of tragedy. Victor Frankl, as we
all know, was tortured in Nazi concentration camps where everything was taken from him and others. And yet,
in the midst of his inquiries, he saw resources, relationships, and regenerative possibilities that literally gave life
to many. Frankl documented numerous examples of the generative power of choosing to look for the life-
promoting meaning in the midst of extreme suffering. He manifested a belief originally put forward by Rollo
May (1975, p. 100) that “Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in
that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.”
What we would like to underscore here is that AI is not about being or thinking positively or negatively. Its call
is to transcend this polarity. It is not about positive versus negative human experience, but the choice to inquire
into what is life. The task of AI is the penetrating search for what gives life, what fuels developmental potential,
and what has deep meaning—even in the midst of the tragic. In so many times of disruption, there is always
the radically increased potential to summon our better humanity. That is why the best in human systems
can burst forth just as life, even a blade of grass can bust out all over, even after a heavy cement highway has
been placed over it. Resilience, even in the midst of tragedy, CAN grow. It is not a noun, not a thing, but a verb;
something that can be built and forged in the crucible of crises. Resiliencing is the developmental act where
corporate culture and values can be vivified and extended into a better “new normal” with their meanings made
alive, instead of merely espoused. There are many heroic and often spiritually advanced examples. We might
think of a Martin Luther King, or a Nelson Mandela, or a Gandhi. Consider too Helen Keller and her deeper
reflection that, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it” (Keller, 1903, p.
5)—and she, of course, could not see the “overcoming” with normal eyes.
A Time for Embracing the Change Paradox
What AI does then, in terms of a theory of change, is that it embraces one of the most difficult and meanest
paradoxes of changing. It argues that we change best when we are strongest. As human beings we can change
best and in the most capacity filled ways when we experience the combined power of every relevant resource,
even the tiniest seed of hope, available to us across the entire strengths spectrum. These resources occur outside
and inside any given system, and include social and cultural assets, technical and economic ones, psychological
and spiritual strengths, ecological strengths of nature, and the strengths of moral models and collaborative
creativity. And if we change best when we are strongest, or have access to everything needed for resourcing our
change capacity (encircling the change agenda in a kind of “surround sound of strengths”) then the reverse is
also true. This is the difficult paradox inherent in situations where change, resilience, and renewal are needed
most, for example, when a person is in a dark depression, or there are immanent threats of a company facing
bankruptcy, or a community dealing with a mass shooting—or society facing a pandemic. At precisely, those
moments when we feel the weakest or trapped in deeply cynical conversations (Bright et al., 2014), we are
being asked to change! This mean paradox should be reversed, shouldn’t it?