Appreciative Inquiry and Sustainable Value Creation

Asking the question ‘Strategy for what purpose?’ suggests that managers need more than clear objectives and good execution to accomplish organizational goals and identify those whom they benefit. In a similar fashion, this entry asks, ‘Appreciative Inquiry (AI) for what purpose?’ It argues that having well-crafted objectives and great execution are no longer enough for AI practitioners concerned with global systems dynamics. Typical AI objectives such as increased employee engagement and organizational effectiveness benefit from having an overarching purpose that ranges beyond a company's strategic vision and mission. Purpose is particularly important in a world that has become simultaneously more crisis-prone and dependent on business to resolve rising challenges, from climate stability to energy and food security, to peace and social justice.

Sustainable value, defined here as a measure of those strategies and practices that enable business to act as a force for good, represents such a governing purpose for AI practitioners. AI is a uniquely well-adapted change methodology for creating sustainable value by virtue of the abductive (or design) logic it applies to goal setting, its grounding in positive action theory and emphasis on whole systems and its use of processes that engage key stakeholders in the effort to realize the desired change. A unique relationship exists therefore between sustainable value and AI: The former provides AI with a governing purpose, while the latter provides sustainable value with a powerful methodology for planning and execution.

While it is not necessary for every organization to become an agent of world benefit, this entry assumes fundamentally that any change practitioner who is intent on creating a thriving organization must address global issues such as dwindling natural resources, radical transparency and rising societal expectations. Recent evidence suggests that sustainability is now entering the business mainstream and that creating sustainable value (or ‘shared value’, as Michael Porter and Mark Kramer recently termed the concept) is becoming a factor for organizational success in every sector of the economy.