Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative Inquiry is about the co-evolutionary search for the best in people, their organisations, and the relevant world around them. It involves the systematic discovery of what gives “life” to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most constructively capable in economic, ecological, and human terms. Appreciative Inquiry involves the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to anticipate and heighten positive potential. It involves the mobilisation of inquiry through the crafting of the “unconditionally positive question” often-involving hundreds or sometimes thousands of people. In Appreciative Inquiry the arduous task of intervention gives way to the speed of imagination and innovation; instead of negation, criticism, and spiralling diagnosis, there is discovery, dream and design.

Appreciative Inquiry seeks to build a constructive union between a whole people and their achievements, assets, unexplored potentials, innovations, strengths, opportunities, benchmarks, high point moments, lived values, traditions, strategic competencies, stories, expressions of wisdom and insights as well as their visions of valued and possible futures.