“Appreciative Inquiry is about the coevolutionary search for the best in people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them."
-David Cooperrider
When asked what is the great task of leadership, Peter Drucker answered, “To create an alignment of strengths in ways that make a system’s weaknesses irrelevant.” Too often change management begins by finding weaknesses — the gaps, inadequacies, and ultimately blame — and ends with a strategy to minimize any disadvantage. Organizations use this style of management analysis to design solutions that focus on problem-solving by reengineering or removing a weakness. These deficit-based forms of analysis keep companies from realizing their full potential. “An organization that inquires into problems will keep finding problems,” a strategy that is no longer effective in today’s complex and competitive business environment.
Appreciative Inquiry — or AI — is a process that focuses on leveraging an organization’s core strengths rather than seeking to overcome or minimize its weaknesses. AI takes these strengths and builds on them to create the exceptional performance that occurs when strengths are aligned. Corporations around the world are embracing AI and implementing the philosophy that strength connected to strength will create change; the kind of change that capitalizes on people’s energy and passion, a change that connects people to their real strengths, and will ultimately build your organization into an industry leader.
David Cooperrider is one of the leading figures in the strengths revolution in management, and the creator of the theory of Appreciative Inquiry, which has established itself as the most important contemporary approach to OD.
In this session David shares:
- New research findings showing how and why "positivity" and strengths do more than signal optimal organizational functioning-that they create upward spirals where strengths do more than perform, they transform.
- Stories of new horizons in Appreciative Inquiry which illustrate-at companies such as Wal-Mart and award winning Fairmount Minerals how strengths-based OD can help guide the highest levels of business strategy formulation
- The "three circles of the strengths revolution"-and how to leverage and unite many seemingly disparate OD innovations into one integral and powerful whole
David's serves as advisor some of the world's largest corporations and has been called upon to bring Appreciative Inquiry into significant change initiatives launched by the head of the US Navy, with His Holiness Dalai Lama, and with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. He has received many awards for his writing and work including being named "top visionary in the field" (Training Magazine) and "faculty pioneer" by the Aspen Institute. David is the Fairmount Minerals Professor in the Department of Organizational Behavior at Case Western Reserve University where he has written and co-authored 21 books and 77 articles and book chapters. His most recent passion is the new Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit, which studies how sustainability is the biggest business opportunity of the 21st century.