Paul Chaffee is the Executive Director of the Interfaith Center at the Presidio. This Web resource is based on an essay he wrote for the 2004 book published by Alban, www.congregationalresources.org. A print-ready version is available by clicking on the link at the bottom of the left-hand menu. (You'll need to have installed the free download, Adobe Acrobat.)

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Introduction

I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly––John 10:10.

After two frustrating years of working on a difficult sexual harassment problem at a Fortune 500 company, an organization development consultant specializing in gender issues and conflict resolution sought help from David Cooperrider—a professor at Case Western Reserve University and the originator of "appreciative inquiry" (AI). The consultant told Cooperrider that, confounding her firm’s best efforts, every measure showed that this company's harassment problem had grown worse. The situation had the consultant and her colleagues stymied. They were working hard, going backwards, and asking for help.

"What is it you want to learn about and achieve?" Cooperrider asked. They wanted to "put a dent" in a "huge problem" of harassment, the consultant told him. "Is that all you want?" Cooperrider asked. Pressed, the consultant reached beyond the problem and replied, "We want . . . high-quality cross-gender relationships in the workplace."

In the resulting model project, employees were invited—as a first step—to write about their experiences involving exemplars of healthy cross-gender working relationships. Dozens of responses were anticipated and hundreds arrived, each full of stories about employees working together creatively and happily. From these stories a program evolved that transformed the corporation.¹

Executives at Avon Mexico heard of the project’s success and hired appreciative inquiry (AI) practitioner Marjorie Schiller to lead their whole corporation in an "inquiry" based on the same model. As an initial step, 300 one-on-one interviews were conducted, resulting in a flood of stories about "achievement, trust building, authentic joint leadership, practices of effective conflict management, ways of dealing with sex stereotypes, stages of development, and methods of career advancement—all focused on high-quality cross-gender work relationships."² Eventually the company won the 1997 Catalyst Award as the best place in Mexico for women to work.

The methodology that led to these remarkable events was spawned in the early 1980s when David Cooperrider—then a student at Case Western—was trying to figure out why the health clinic he was studying didn’t have any of the problems he had been trained to "fix." What he learned later upended the organization development profession and revitalized hundreds of different kinds of communities around the world.

1. Jane Magruder Watkins and Bernard J. Mohr, Appreciative Inquiry: Change at the Speed of Imagination (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), 123ff.
2. David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney, Appreciative Inquiry (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2000), 12–13.