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Twenty cases of the use of appreciative inquiry (AI) for changing social systems published before 2003 were examined to look for the presence or absence of transformational change and the use of seven principles and practices culled from a review of the theoretical literature on AI. Although all cases began by collecting stories of the positive, followed the 4-D model, and adhered to five principles of AI articulated by Cooperrider and Whitney, only seven (35%) showed transformational outcomes. Highly consistent differences between the transformational cases and the others led the authors to conclude that two qualities of appreciative inquiry that are different from conventional organizational development and change management prescriptions are key to AI's transformative potential: (a) a focus on changing how people think instead of what people do and (b) a focus on supporting self-organizing change processes that flow from new ideas.
Keywords: organizational change; organizational development; appreciative inquiry
All indications are that appreciative inquiry (AI) is an increasingly popular organizational change method, but an almost complete lack of published research exists examining it. Only two attempts to measure its impact exist in the research literature (Bushe & Coetzer, 1995; Jones, 1998), and the first was at the group level. Yet, the past few years have seen an exponential growth in the number of consultants and organizations using AI, the number of graduate theses in organization development that use an AI approach, and the number of practitioner articles and books describing it. Between 1987, when the original seminal article on AI was first published (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987) and 2000, only a handful of articles-the rather sparse, self-published "Thin Book" (Hammond, 1996) and fairly primitive "Lessons From the Field" (Hammond & Royal, 1998)-existed. In 1999, Cooperrider finally published a short book on how to do appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider & Whitney, 1999), and Elliott (1999) published the first serious, scholarly book on applications of AI in the field.
Since 2001, things have changed considerably. Five significant AI books have been published (Cooperrider, Sorensen, Whitney, & Yeager, 2001; Fry, Barrett, Selling, & Whitney, 2002; Ludema, Whitney, Mohr, & Griffen, 2003; Watkins & Mohr, 2001; Whitney & Trosten-Bloom, 2003). Elsevier and Jossey-Bass have each launched a separate series of books on AI. A global consulting firm,...