APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY: Change at the Speed of Imagination, SECOND EDITION

A History of Appreciative Inquiry

The history of Appreciative Inquiry is the history of a major shift in the practice of organization development and transformation. In fact, it is also the history of an unplanned, even unintended, process with no particular intent at all to use it for changing organizations or other human systems. At its inception, the idea that someday Appreciative Inquiry would become a major approach to change in human systems, with associated processes, methods, and theories, was far from the conscious minds of its two most central “parents,” David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva of Case Western Reserve University.

But Appreciative Inquiry did, of course, evolve. It developed from a theory-building process used primarily ...