Positive Psychology at Work:

How to Create Positive Workplaces

Appreciative Inquiry is a positive change methodology that helps organizations identify the root causes of their success, release the positive potential of the organization and its processes and create positive change. As the positive core becomes more visible and acknowledged, it grows in strength, allowing negative elements or weaknesses to be rendered increasingly irrelevant and impotent. By liberating positive emotions such as joy, passion, excitement and pride, and by creating conscious images of a better future based on an expansion of the existing positive core, Appreciative Inquiry creates an impetus for action that can transform organizations. It offers a methodology that perfectly matches method to outcome: it is a positive change methodology for growing a positive workplace. No one is telling the organization ‘how’ to be or how to build a positive culture; it is finding out for itself. There are many books that explain how to do Appreciative Inquiry in some detail; these are cited at the end of the chapter. I have included here the key principles (see Supplement 2.7) and the 4D methodology (Figure 2.3) for easy reference. In addition, we make reference to Appreciative Inquiry throughout this book, but in particular in Chapters 6 and 8. Below, James Butcher's work with a London borough illustrates how collecting and creating images and stories of the organization at its best reveals the values that form the positive core of the organization; ...