Thinking About Problems Using the New Paradigm

So what about all those problems caused by this changing rate of change? Does AI just ignore those? Are we engaging in denial? Doesn’t organization development as a method promote the identification and resolution of problems? Indeed, the practice of OD has traditionally highlighted deficits in the belief that the organization can be returned to a healthy state. Appreciative Inquiry suggests that, by focusing on the deficit, we simply create more images of deficit and potentially overwhelm the system with images of what is “wrong.” All too often, the process of assessing deficits includes a search for who is to blame. This leads to people being resistant to the change effort and to a large amount of literature in the field describing ways to deal with that resistance.

In Appreciative Inquiry, we take a different perspective. When we define a situation as a “problem,” it means that we have an image of how that situation ought to be—how we’d like it to be. Appreciative Inquiry suggests that, by focusing on an image of health and wholeness, the organization’s energy moves to make the image real. Indeed, the seeds of the solution are in the images, and therefore it is not unusual to see a system shift directions “at the speed of imagination!”

In the early days of working with Appreciative Inquiry, we compared problem solving and Appreciative Inquiry as if the two were parallel processes, with one being superior to the other. If AI is seen as just one more organization development methodology, it might usefully be compared to traditional problem solving. If, however, we shift into new paradigm thinking, AI becomes not a methodology, but a way of seeing and being in the world. In other words, when we are using the AI frame, we do not see problems and solutions as separate, but rather as a coherent whole made up of our wishes for the future and our path toward that future. (See Figure 1.1.)

Figure 1.1. Two Different Processes for Organizing Change

The commitment to our current deficit-based paradigm, particularly in our Euro-Centric “Western” culture, is our “default setting,” as it were. That paradigm places high value on the machine metaphor (that we can take things apart, fix what is broken, and return to some ideal state). It takes a great deal of “re-training” of our thought processes to shift our metaphor, our view of the world, to a more organic and holistic image. Margaret Wheatley (1994) writes:

“For months, I have been studying process structures—things that maintain form over time yet have no rigidity of structure. This stream that swirls around my feet is the most beautiful one I’ve encountered. … What is it that streams can teach me about organizations? I am attracted to the diversity I see, to these swirling combinations of mud, silt, grass, water, rocks. This stream has an impressive ability to adapt, to shift the configurations, to let the power balance move, to create new structures. But driving this adaptability, making it all happen, I think, is the water’s need to flow. Water answers to gravity, to downhill, to the call of the ocean. The forms change, but the mission remains clear. Structures emerge, but only as temporary solutions that facilitate rather than interfere. There is none of the rigid reliance on single forms, on true answers, on past practices that I have learned in business. Streams have more than one response to rocks; otherwise, there’d be no Grand Canyon. Or else Grand Canyons everywhere. The Colorado [River] realized that there were ways to get ahead other then by staying broad and expansive.” (pp. 15–16)

If we follow the organic metaphor, we begin to value and embrace the unlimited diversity of nature. In such a frame of mind, it becomes easy to believe that finding one truth—or one right way to do anything—is not the goal. Rather, the goal is to engage the organization in dialogue that creates multiple positive possibilities and moves the organization in the direction of the most desired future. It becomes important to create the most generative and effective way to move forward.

Appreciative Inquiry is rooted in the values of the emerging paradigm. In this mode, organizations create and move toward their vision of the desired future in harmony with a world view that sees the interconnection of all parts of a system; that accepts the complexity and subjectivity of the world; that knows planning to be a continuous and iterative process; that embraces the concept of many truths and multiple ways to reach a goal; that understands the relational nature of the world; that believes information to be a primal creative force; and that knows language to be the creator of “reality.” In other words, the Newtonian paradigm process of dividing things into parts, believing that there is one best way of doing any action and assuming that language describes some ultimate truth for which we all search, creates a way of solving problems that looks backward to what went “wrong” and tries to “fix” it. Appreciative Inquiry, on the other hand, looks for what is going “right” and moves toward it, understanding that in the forward movement toward the ideal the greatest value comes from embracing what works. As Charles Handy (1989) noted in his book The Age of Unreason: “Change is not what it used to be. The status quo will no longer be the best way forward … we are entering an Age of Unreason, when the future, in so many areas, is there to be shaped, by us and for us; a time when the only prediction that will hold true is that no predictions will hold true; a time, therefore, for bold imaginings in private life as well as public, for thinking the unlikely and doing the unreasonable.”

This being said, Chapter 2 provides a definition of Appreciative Inquiry in the context of an approach to organization change that enables OD practitioners to shift not the tools of their practice (team building, strategic planning, organization redesign), but rather to shift the perspective from which they approach these processes.