[ 314 ]
Career Development
International
3/7 [
1998
] 314–319
© MCB University Press
[
ISSN 1362-0436
]
Let’s change the subject and change our
organization: an appreciative inquiry approach to
organization change
Diana Whitney
Whitney Consulting, Taos, New Mexico, USA
Takes a social constructionist
view of organizational change
focusing on how to engage
the multitude of internal and
external stakeholders. Argues
that current models of
change often leave people
feeling demoralized and
presents appreciative inquiry
(AI) as an aproach to organi-
zation development that
deliberately focuses attention
on learning and dialogue
about what gives life to an
organization. Explains AI
principles and the 4-D model
for positive change. Provides
some examples of this.
Organizational identities are embedded and
emergent in conversation. Project planning
discussions, strategic planning meetings,
selection interviews, performance reviews
and staff meetings are all conversations
through which the identities of an organiza-
tion, its products and services and its mem-
bers are crafted. The efforts of change agents
toward development – personal and organiza-
tional – can best be understood as interven-
tions into the conversational processes and
relational realities of the organization.
The language of organization development
in the 1990s is saturated with relationally
embedded words such as participation,
involvement, empowerment, diversity and
membership. It is readily recognized by orga-
nization development professionals that the
greater the involvement of people in the
process, the greater their commitment to
change. That is, the more involvement people
have in crafting change – personal and orga-
nizational – the more likely they are to carry
it through to fruition.
From a social constructionist point of view,
that posits knowledge, meaning and identity
as socially generated, conscious involvement
is an imperative. A constructionist view
holds involvement and participation as
givens. Organization stakeholders do partici-
pate, they are involved. The nature and qual-
ity of participation may not be as we would
want it. It may not provide the results
desired. It does, however, define the organiza-
tion. To change an organization is to change
the nature and quality of participation and
interaction among the many organization
stakeholders. It is to change who talks to
whom about what. When this occurs cus-
tomers and vendors become a part of the
whole organization, rather than outsiders.
Employees and managers have equality of
voice, rather than hierarchically defined
voice. Stories of success in one part of the
organization are spread across the organiza-
tion and become new standards of practice.
Mutually valued processes, products, ser-
vices and results emerge.
The question facing change agents, consul-
tants, human resource practitioners and
managers, is not whether to involve organiza-
tion members and stakeholders in change but
rather how to engage the multitude of inter-
nal and external stakeholders, all speaking
different languages, in large scale efforts
toward organizational change.
Total quality efforts, employee involvement
teams and participatory management prac-
tices have been a step in the right direction.
They have set the stage for an active, involved
workforce. They have surfaced people’s desire
to contribute. And they have shown their own
limits. First, they are representative rather
than fostering full voice and expression
among all stakeholders. Founded on small
group theory that suggests the optimal size
group is five to seven people, current efforts
to engage the workforce involve some of the
people, some of the time. In order to success-
fully reinvent an organization, all of the inter-
ested parties must be involved throughout the
process. As the newsletter of an international
window fashions company declares, “All
voices, all opinions, all ideas”.
Second, most of our current development
models – personal and organizational – are
deficit based. They engage organization mem-
bers in a study of what is unsuitable, not
working, not up to standard, and in need of a
“fix”. Problem-solving approaches to change
management leave people feeling demoral-
ized and hopeless about their future and the
future of their organization. Successful devel-
opment efforts depend on forms of involve-
ment and participation that invite the best of
people and their ideas to surface and to be put
into practice. Successful change emerges
when curiosity, creativity and inspiration are
present.
Appreciative inquiry
Companies around the world are engaged in
bold experiments with an innovative process
of organization development called apprecia-
tive inquiry (AI). Developed by Dr David
Cooperrider and colleagues at Case Western
Reserve University and The Taos Institute, AI
is based on the principle that organizations
change in the direction of what they study.
Inquiry – whether it is an organization sur-
vey, a question posed by a manager at the
start of a meeting, or the study used to