Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative Inquiry is an approach to organizational analysis and learning that is uniquely intended for discovering, understanding, and fostering innovations in social organizational arrangements and processes.  Appreciative Inquiry (also referred to as “Al”) refers to two things:

• A search for knowledge and
• A theory of intentional collective action, which are designed to evolve the vision and will of a group, organization or society as a whole.

AI is an inquiry process that affirms our symbolic capacities of imagination and mind as well as our social capacity for conscious choice and cultural evolution. The art of appreciation is the art of discovering and valuing those factors that give life to an organization or group.  The process involves interviewing and storytelling to draw the best of the past to set the stage for effective visualization of what might be.