AI and the Field of Organization Development

Describing Appreciative Inquiry as yet another OD tool, technique, or intervention is, at best, only partially accurate, and, at worst, a disservice to those who seek to facilitate the co-creation of quantum shifts in the capability of an organization to meet the needs of its customers, members, and other key stakeholders. Rather, we invite the reader to think of Appreciative Inquiry as a philosophy and orientation to change that can fundamentally reshape the practice of organization learning, design, and development in much the same way that the philosophy of “process consultation” reshaped the field of management consulting fifty years ago.

In the early days of management consulting, the consultant was the outside expert who came to study an organization, decide what needed to be done to fix it, and propose a course of action. Long reports were written and, more often than not, sat on shelves gathering dust. Consultants became discouraged, employees resisted, and clients became cynical.

With the advent of organization development as a discipline in the 1950s, the behavioral scientists, who were experts not in the work of the organization but in the behavior of people, introduced the idea that the people of an organization were the ones best equipped to identify what needed to be changed and to formulate ways to make those changes. Instead of prescribing solutions, consultants began to facilitate members of the organization in formulating their own solutions to problems that they had identified.

Called “process consultation,” this new orientation—new philosophy of consulting—was indeed used sometimes in the form of a tool, technique, or method. For example, a consultant might sit with a team and comment on their interpersonal and group-level processes. But it was “process consultation” in the macro sense—for example, providing a client system with processes for co-creation of its future—that the value of process consultation as a philosophy, an orientation to all that a management consultant does, really emerged. The paradigmatic shift was from consultants bringing in solutions to the problem, to consultants providing models and processes to help organizations study themselves and formulate their own unique solutions.

What is happening with Appreciative Inquiry is very similar. Like process consultation, AI can be and is sometimes applied effectively as a micro tool. For example, in team building a team could engage in a process of inquiry to strengthen its capability to function effectively. We often hear people say, “We did AI in our team and it really energized us.” (A team-building session in an AI frame would generally use positive questions, follow-up visioning, and some form of planning.) But as with process consultation, the real power and impact of AI is seen when it is used as a comprehensive orientation to change in complex systems. By comprehensive change we mean change in an orientation to discerning strategic shifts in the relationship of the enterprise with its environment, changes in the way the work of the organization is done, and/or changes in how the organization approaches problems of leadership, performance, conflict, power, and equity. AI is a philosophy and perspective that provides an approach to strategic planning, organization design, diversity, evaluation, and so on, rather than an alternative to these interventions.

Appreciative Inquiry as a theory of practice and a methodologically fluid process continues to expand, develop, and change as we learn about the power of its perspective and how to integrate that perspective into all the work done under the umbrella of organization change. In the year 2000 when the first edition of this book was written, AI had already evolved substantially since David Cooperrider first introduced the term in 1986. In 2000 when the organization called AI Consulting was created, the list of those practicing OD from an AI perspective included forty-three names. In 2009, less than a decade later, a global AI Conference in Nepal included participants from forty-three countries. AI’s growth and impact is spreading exponentially as it becomes global. If those of us using AI remain true to its principles and theoretical base, it will continue to look different in every setting and in subsequent years. Any attempt at a simple, static definition is challenged by both the rapidly evolving nature of AI theory and practice as well as by the subtle and dramatic implications of the paradigmatic shift embedded in its application to human and organization change.

The evolution of Appreciative Inquiry from an academic interest in grounded theory building to AI as a new orientation and philosophical base for organization development is documented in the history of AI. Our continuing argument that AI is far more than just another OD methodology comes from our conviction that the practice of AI as an organization change process is deeply rooted in the theory of social constructionism and the research base on the power of image in determining what human beings consider to be “reality.”

We think of Appreciative Inquiry as three interconnected concepts:

We will describe each of these three in more detail in this chapter. To begin, we will set a context for the practice of Appreciative Inquiry in today’s world.