Appreciative Inquiry
Appreciative Inquiry changes an organisation by studying what is already working and building more of it, instead of starting from a list of what's broken.
Stages sit in a circle, each feeding into the next with no fixed start or end point.
Reach for this when…
- Every change project starts with a deficit audit and morale drops before anything improves.
- People have stopped offering ideas because the last 'listening exercise' went nowhere.
- You need real buy-in for change after top-down diagnosis has failed twice already.
How to run it
- Discover: interview people about times things worked well and why.
- Dream: build a shared picture of what 'more of that' would look like at scale.
- Design: agree the structures, roles and practices that would make the dream normal.
- Destiny: commit to specific actions, then revisit the cycle.
A worked example
Situation. Amina Mwakalinga chaired a 340-member dairy cooperative near Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where morale had collapsed after two restructuring attempts built entirely on lists of what was wrong.
Applied. Instead of another audit, she ran Discover interviews asking members to describe their best season with the cooperative and why it worked, then built the Dream and Design stages around the specific practices that came up: shared transport days, same-day milk payment.
Result. Members proposed extending same-day payment to every route themselves. Attendance at cooperative meetings roughly doubled over the next two seasons.
The catch
Appreciative Inquiry can dodge a genuine crisis - if the roof is on fire, you need root-cause work, not a strengths interview. It also depends on real stories, not manufactured positivity: a facilitator who suppresses honest complaint gets a Dream stage nobody actually believes.
If the room can't name what's actually broken, the appreciative conversation is theatre, not method.
Origin: David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva