Change Through Appreciatvie Inquiry Critique

Abstract:

Appreciative Inquiry(AI), is a new and a less painful way to get the employees to change. Instead of finding “problems” and its “solutions” within the organization. AI prefer to discover the “right” things an organization achieved in the past and emphasized them. The author brought example of Really Rapid Transit Inc., an organization tried to diagnose the problems and prescribe solutions while Enlightened Lighting Inc., applied the AI approach which helped it to find out the organization’s strengths and potential.

The author presented five principles of AI: the constructionist principle, the principle of simultaneity, the anticipatory principle, the poetic principle and the positive principle. It leads a conclusion that AI is a on-going process needs each and every employee to participate. There are five steps of this process:

• Make the focus of inquiry positive, ask questions in a positive way – “What we’ve done best and how we did that.”

• Elicit positive stories, encourage employees to tell their positive stories, which could energized other employees and might helped build up a process based on telling and hearing.

• Locate themes that appear in the stories, what the organization would be like if these exceptional moments in those stories could be a organization-wide norm.

• Create shared images in the future, to transform the high points identified in those stories to reality.

• Find innovative ways to create that future, find new ways to bring the preferred future to life.

By accomplish the AI process to daily life in an organization, the employees within that organization could recognized their own contribution and got rewarded not only by their salary, but also a satisfaction of fulfillment and inspiration.

Critique:

I appreciate the AI approach because it have many common grounds with my weltanschauung. I believe our world is built on love and appreciation not complain and punishment. The...