Appreciative Inquiry's Potential

The success of the appreciative inquiry approach has led to its wide use, but the scope of its application signals its potential—not as a silver bullet for solving the world’s ills but as a healthier, more generative framework for developing relationships that make community meaningful. AI is being applied to Suzuki violin instruction, village development in Nepal, municipal and state revitalization projects from Chicago to northeast India’s Nagaland, grassroots interfaith activities on five continents, manifold educational and medical institutions, and small businesses as well as corporations.

Both Case Western Reserve University and Benedictine University offer graduate programs in AI, and hundreds each year participate in a multitude of appreciative inquiry workshops offered through the Taos Institute. More than 80 AI excellence-in-nonprofit projects have been sponsored in 70 countries through multimillion-dollar U.S. State Department funding. Thousands participate in the "Appreciative Inquiry Commons," a Web resource and community devoted to sharing tools and ideas for and among appreciative practitioners.

Distress within America’s religious sector and a weary cynicism about the panoply of "new" organizational support structures may help explain the religious community’s tardy response to appreciative inquiry. Statistics published in 1996 suggest that one in three American congregations fired its last pastor.⁵ In most ecosystems this would be called an epidemic. Even more disturbing, concerted hard work to overcome our ecclesial "problems" has not helped the general health of the institution much.

However, initial appreciative applications in religious communities offer considerable hope. My own first contact with this novel, epistemologically based approach to community came when circumstances in 1994 placed me in the initial planning group of what later became the United Religions Initiative (URI), a global grassroots interfaith organization. From the start, Cooperrider and Dr. Diana Whitney (a frequent project partner and one of Cooperrider’s most respected AI colleagues), along with several of their doctoral students, guided the organizational design process for URI. The sudden emergence of URI represents the largest start-to-fully-developed appreciative project in the world.

During a four-year process, many thousands were involved in writing and signing a URI charter. Three years after the signing, 211 active United Religions Initiative Cooperation Circles in 48 countries had self-organized, and the number continues to increase each month. Observing AI’s approach to building strong, vital relationships among different faith communities in a very short period of time has been a continuing education.

AI’s remarkable ability to engender trust and enthusiasm even among distrusting people bodes particularly well as we consider revitalizing life within faith communities. A few years ago Loren Mead’s seminal work on the "once and future church" initiated a conversation about a new world and its implications for faith communities, and spoke persuasively about the need to develop new social architecture for the church. We will explore how appreciative inquiry might be a beneficial contributor in that quest.

The benefits for me start at a personal level. As an interfaith-formed Christian, the discipline of being an appreciative inquirer deepens my spiritual practice, enriches me theologically, and has improved my capacity to be a good husband and father.

The issue here, though, is generating vitality, engagement, and health in communities of believers. It’s been argued that AI’s most congruent, comfortable context ultimately will be the faith family because congregations already encourage AI’s emphasis on values, storytelling, visioning, and serving the highest good—activities easier for a church council or pastor to broach than a corporation board or its CEO. In fact, Cooperrider’s father was a Lutheran pastor who struggled painfully for years before successfully integrating his congregation racially, a drama that did not go unnoticed by a son who subsequently dedicated his life to community transformation without the acid etch of protracted conflict.

As an active United Church of Christ layman, David Cooperrider used AI to bring his own congregation through a remarkably successful journey—a transformation from being a liberal, mostly Caucasian church to being a fully multicultural and multiethnic faith family. Several years later his pastor remains happy with the outcome, and still incredulous that 400 members unanimously agreed about anything, much less a complex, successful strategy for opening the multiethnic door.

Diversity also characterizes AI practitioners. Contributors to the emerging AI literature come from a rainbow of religious and spiritual traditions around the world. Buddhists sharing what they treasure about their tradition are as illuminating and compelling as Christians doing the same—within the family or between traditions. Like the ubiquitous golden rule, AI offers a perspective that seeks out the goodness in any system of relationships and then gives participants ways to magnify and give life to that goodness.

The initial jolt I experienced upon encountering AI came in the form of a stunning realization that it systematically delivered on values the Christian family holds high but often fails to embody, such as taking "the least of these my children" as seriously as everyone else in the community, and booting the debilitating judgmentalism that so often polarizes and shreds faith families.

Here a warning is in order: on first contact, most folks recognize something familiar about appreciative inquiry. I’ve often heard, "Oh, we already do that in our church." Indeed, wherever community gathers, even in crisis and breakdown, one can find flashes of light and goodness worth appreciating, however hidden to the casual or critical eye. Fortunate congregations—particularly vital, healthy ones—can be amazingly appreciative in all sorts of ways; I dare say they will also be among the first to embrace the developing nuance and complexity of an approach that investigates appreciation systematically.

But it is important to recognize that AI is not a miracle salve, not a set of self-help exercises or a one-chapter story. Instead, it is an empowering epistemological perspective that personalizes, honors, and learns from a community’s best accomplishments and most precious values. Then it opens the horizon to take us miles beyond self-interest and old expectations, all the while staying grounded in the commitment bringing us to community in the first place.

Underestimating the scope of this opportunity is a danger. The "appreciative interview" that initiates and keeps punctuating most AI projects is so simple, powerful, and popular that you can head home, immediately use it with your congregation, and think you’ve mastered a new, creative fad. That would keep you from exploring "provocative propositions," an equally compelling appreciative tool for nurturing organizational health and enthusiasm, along with the self-organizing, ecologically based social technology that provides traction for delivering our dreams and visions. Simply put, underestimating this methodology kills the goose with the golden egg.

As we begin, it seems appropriate to address a question: What is it that you want to learn about and achieve? For my part, I want to learn how we can liberate the capacity of the church and its millions of followers to really do what is most important in our faith, freed from the agonies of internal conflict, focused on what we do best, and effectively translating the gospel of love to a world in pain. More specifically, I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to introduce a new treasure house for revitalizing congregations and their members.

5. Paul Chaffee, Accountable Leadership (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996), 4–5.