Appreciative Inquiry

Historical and Theoretical Roots of AI

Originating in the Department of Organizational Behavior at Case Western Reserve University in the early 1980s, AI was first conceived as a radical departure from mainstream OD theory and practice. At that time, OD thought and techniques were dominated by the Lewinian paradigm of unfreezing-change-refreezing and the action research process which focused on diagnosing the ‘felt need’ of the client or client system. In questioning if ‘diagnosis' was a necessary or even useful step in organizational change and if unfreezing people through guilt induction, threat or disconfirmation was effective, Suresh Srivastva, David Cooperrider and their colleagues incorporated social constructionist perspectives in framing an alternative idea—AI. Srivastva and Cooperrider argued that organizations were best viewed as socially constructed realities and that forms of organization were constrained only by human imagination and the shared beliefs of organizational members. As socially constructed realities, forms of inquiry were potent in constructing the systems they inquired into, and thus, problem-solving approaches were just as likely to create more of the very problems they were intended to solve. Finally, they asserted that the most important drivers for change were new ideas. They decried the lack of new ideas generated by conventional action research and proposed AI as a method [Page 45]that was more likely to create new ideas, images and theories that would lead to social innovations.

The Case Western Reserve University faculty and student group focused early on the philosophy behind AI. In acknowledging the limitations of their own research and practice in OD, they observed the inherent diagnostic, problem-focused language and tools being applied in OD work. This, combined with the emerging meta-analyses of the effectiveness of planned change methods estimated at only 25–30 per cent, shaped a call for rethinking how and why human systems change.

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