Meta:Training/Program Evaluation/Introduction to Appreciative Inquiry/The Importance of Appreciative Inquiry and How it Works

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The Importance of Appreciative Inquiry and How it Works

"Appreciative Inquiry offers a method that seeks to cultivate innovation and change while becoming unlocked from conventional assumptions regarding diagnosis and problem solving” ~ Barrett and Fry, 2008, p 37

  • It builds relationships rather than strictly defined roles
  • It creates opportunity for all voices to be heard and opportunities for people to dream and share their visions
  • It creates an environment in which people can choose how to contribute
  • It gives people both discretion and support to act
  • It encourages and enables people to be positive

The Appreciative Inquiry perspective also reduces the narrowing viewpoint of deficit-based thinking and vocabularies that stymy inquiry and questioning, fragment efforts, reduce the vision, and create a dependence on experts and hierarchy. The Appreciative Inquiry viewpoint is that deficit-based language not only creates loaded vocabulary and images that restrict creativity and success, but also leads people to focus on, and constantly discover, further problems rather than possibilities.

“Taking an Appreciative Inquiry Perspective acts to balance the potentially negative view of performance. By identifying and highlighting the positive achievements, you are adding to your assessment valuable information about what is working well and how you can build on those results.” ~ Watkins et al., 2011, p. 80

Importantly, within an Appreciative Inquiry approach problems should be acknowledged while avoiding assumptions that:

  • There is an ideal way for things to be
  • If a situation is not what we want it is a problem to be solved
  • The way to solve a problem is to break it down into parts and analyze it
  • If we find a broken part and fix it, the whole will be fixed or better off

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