“Without the question, you have no space for the answer.”
— Clayton Christensen, beloved Harvard business professor & author
How do we change? How do groups of people change?
Doctoral student David Cooperrider set out to answer this question in the early 1980’s. He discovered that organizational management was missing the mark. It tended to view organizations as machines that simply need to be fixed. It tended to focus on fixing the broken, on issues and problems when trying to affect change.
His breakthrough was through positive psychology, realizing that change tends to happen best not when we focus on weaknesses and flaws, but when we focus on what is working. As Steve De Shazer said, “Problem talk creates problems – solution talk creates solutions.”
Essentially, we drive in the direction of our gaze. Out of this Cooperrider developed AI (Appreciative Inquiry), a powerful tool for corporate change that focuses on elevating what is working. It views organizations not as machines, but as living, vibrant organisms. This view changes everything. AI birthed a host of approaches that we see today such as strengths based leadership.
“We live in worlds our questions create.”
– David Cooperrider
AI is a helpful framework for organizational change, and I’ve found it has positively impacted my sales as well. Instead of viewing organizations as “machines” that need fixing, it’s helped me to view them as living organisms. It’s helped me ask better questions, more aspirational questions, and not just questions about “what’s broken” or “what needs fixing.”
What I also love is that Cooperrider did the opposite of copyright his ideas. In fact, he always put on the cover pages of notes and his slides, just the opposite of copyright: he instead used “right to copy.”
Here’s a primer on Appreciative Inquiry, for the curious-minded. You have the right to copy!
The 5 D’s of Appreciative Inquiry
Definition, Discovery, Dream, Design, & Delivery/Destiny
