Appreciative inquiry is a dialogue method that brings together members of an organisation to clarify, develop and integrate their visions about their joint endeavours by identifying what is good about their visions and how to move the organisation to a higher level of goal attainment. The process produces better understanding of the present situation and future possibilities and facilitates better decision making through its focus on the team’s strengths. While it is generally used in an organisational context, it appears that it can be readily applied to research integration.
Appreciative inquiry is based explicitly on a constructivist world view—that is, an understanding that our perceptions of reality are socially produced and reproduced, rather than representing fixed, external realities. An important implication of this position for appreciative inquiry is that our realities are open to change when we see the world through different eyes.
Appreciative inquiry works from a set of eight assumptions.
In every society, organisation or group, something works.
What we focus on becomes our reality.
Reality is created in the moment, and there are multiple realities.
The act of asking questions of an organisation or group influences the group in some way.
People have more confidence and comfort to journey to the future (the unknown) when they carry forward parts of the past (the known).
If we carry forward parts of the past, they should be what is best about the past.
It is important to value differences.
The language we use creates our reality. (Hammond 1998)
The most important characteristic of appreciative inquiry is its focus on what has worked well within a team or organisation, in contrast to the more common approach of identifying problems (what has not worked well) and analysing these. As appreciative inquiry proponents regularly point out, if 95 per cent of a company’s clients express satisfaction with how the company meets their needs, why bother to analyse the 5 per cent of failures when far more can be learned, and the company can become far more effective, by analysing what is going well with the other 95 per cent?
The implementation of appreciative inquiry occurs in four phases:
appreciating and valuing the best of ‘what is’
envisioning what ‘might be’
dialoguing ‘what should be’
envisioning ‘what will be’.
This covers the ‘4-D’ cycle of appreciative inquiry: discovery, dream, design and destiny.
People who use appreciative inquiry in organisational development and other applications report that participants in the group discussions readily become energised, animated and captured by the power of the process, with its emphasis on what works rather than on deficits, and the shift in shared attitudes from fixing problems to building on past successes.
In terms of research integration, appreciative inquiry is a method to clarify visions of the researchers and stakeholders and to draw them together into a shared vision for the future of the research. That then forms the basis of decision making about how the research team might operate in the future, and what goals it should work towards attaining.
What was the context for the integration?
Significant challenges exist in the health and social welfare systems in meeting the needs of elderly people discharged from hospital into the community, many without adequate support available from their families or community agencies.
What was the integration aiming to achieve and who was intended to benefit?
Appreciative inquiry was used to bring together people from 37 agencies who were concerned about this problem (Reed et al. 2002). It involved clarifying agency personnel visions for better hospital discharge experiences for older people and developing action plans to help turn these visions into reality. The process was structured explicitly to elicit a variety of different visions and to narrow these down to a small number, agreed on by participants, that could be turned into realistic action plans.
What was being integrated?
The agencies invited to participate included older people’s organisations, community and hospital trusts, local government, community organisations and others in the healthcare sector. In addition to these key groups, other significant organisations, such as gas and electricity suppliers, participated. The individuals involved had a variety of backgrounds, including health professionals such as nurses and doctors, and lay people from older people’s organisations.
Who did the integration and how was it undertaken?
The appreciative inquiry exercise was initiated by sending letters of invitation to 37 local agencies in the Newcastle Health Authority in the United Kingdom. Seventy-one people expressed interest in participating.
Three workshops were held. The first introduced the appreciative inquiry method and trained participants in it. In particular, they developed interviewing and recording skills. They were tasked to interview people in their organisations, the community and so on using the core appreciative inquiry dialogic approach. This entailed the following steps:
Interviewers asked people to tell them about a time when they felt that a hospital discharge had gone well
Interviewers then asked probing questions to explore what people had valued about their contribution to that discharge experience and what they felt had helped them to contribute
Interviewees were asked to imagine that a miracle had occurred overnight that had helped discharges to go well every time
They were then asked to tell the interviewer what would be different about the world after the miracle, what would be in place, what would be happening and what the results would be (Reed et al. 2002).
At the second workshop, the data from the interviews were discussed in detail to identify what the participants thought were the key themes. As part of this process, the facilitators combined a nominal group approach with appreciative inquiry to ensure that all had an equal opportunity to contribute to the evolving consensus. At the third workshop, provocative propositions were developed and discussed, and from that action plans were developed.
This process brought to light the diverse visions for better post-hospital experiences for older people in the community and collapsed and prioritised these into a manageable set of themes and action plans. The breadth of the visions elicited and integrated through the process is revealed in the following list of provocative propositions developed in the third workshop:
Every worker/patient/carer knows exactly what other workers do
Every worker has the opportunity within their job to develop and use networks across the system
Every worker takes responsibility to act on information that they hold or receive about the person and their circumstances
There is a process for checking up to ensure that the person going home is managing and has received all the services they were expecting
There is co-ordination of the process of going home to avoid duplication and/or gaps in the services and support provided
Resources and funding are co-ordinated to avoid disputes or time-consuming negotiations
All patients are given individually tailored information and support to ensure choice and ownership of their own health/social care
There are joint care plans (held by the patient) and shared documentation/information
Care is flexible and responsive and there is a fall back strategy. (Reed et al. 2002:41)
What was the outcome of the integration?
The researchers responsible for this process (Reed et al. 2002) reported that most of the participants were pleased with the appreciative inquiry process to which they had contributed. They pointed out, though, some of its limitations, including the perception that it ignored problems (by focusing on the positives), the challenges to the evaluation of the process and the fact that (on this occasion) the quality of the action plans was adversely affected owing to the limited participation in the process by high-level decision makers. Nonetheless, this is an example of the integration of the visions of a range of actors keen to improve the organisational responses to older people’s needs in such a manner as to produce a set of action plans to make that a reality.
Action plans were developed based on the propositions developed. These were as follows:
the development of an information pack, to be accessible to all patients, carers and agencies, about support services and resources for people going home from hospital
holding an event for people involved in training and staff development
each agency should identify key people to oversee the process, including follow-up
a person-centred care plan should be developed that is easy to understand and that includes the views of users and carers. The group knew of some developments in this area and agreed to explore them further (adapted from Reed et al. 2002).
What was the integration aiming to achieve and who was intended to benefit?
The appreciative inquiry approach was used in a department within a South African university to develop a code of ethics and an approach to ethical management that realised a shared vision of ‘what “could be”, rather than “what was”’ with respect to departmental ethics (van Vuuren and Crous 2005:403).
Who did the integration and how was it undertaken?
Thirty-six members of a university department attended a 12-hour appreciative inquiry intervention, spread over three sessions. Group processes facilitated by two industrial psychologists (the processes were not described) were used to clarify the topic (‘a vision for ethics’), the discovery phase identified what was going well and desires for an ethical future, and the dream phase identified 18 important issues that were distilled to four core themes. In the design phase, provocative propositions were developed and discussed and the destiny phase produced the new code of ethics and plans for its implementation.
What was the outcome of the integration?
Participants were unanimous that the process and product exceeded their expectations. Through the appreciative inquiry approach to dialogue, participants of all ranks in the organisation were able to develop and share their individual visions for its ethical future and produce an integrated vision, which all shared, in the form of a code of ethics and an action plan for its implementation. The appreciative inquiry method created better understanding of the issues and the way forward, integrating the visions of the members of the department about how ethics could become core business within the organisation.
What was being integrated?
All the academic and administrative staff of the university department were invited to participate and 36—all but two—agreed to do so. Further information about the participants was not provided.
What was the context for the integration?
The appreciative inquiry exercise was conducted within an academic department of a large, state-funded South African university: the University of Johannesburg. It was undertaken in the context of improving the governance of the department, specifically to realise the staff’s desire to create ‘an ethical way forward’ for the department (van Vuuren and Crous 2005:408).
The two case studies show that appreciative inquiry focuses on developing a shared vision, rather than trying to accommodate different visions. The value of the process is that it leaps ahead with the assumption that a shared vision is important and achievable, rather than trying to clarify and accommodate differences in current visions. This will not be beneficial for all cases of research integration, so other methods for integrating visions will also be required.
Both of the cases deal with stakeholders only and disciplinary knowledge is not brought to bear. Even though the second case involves members of an academic department, disciplinary expertise is not relevant to moving forward on the problem in this instance.
In both cases, researchers organised the dialogue, but there was little description of their roles. Both cases were focused on improving practice rather than improving understanding about an issue.
The embedding of the nominal group technique in the first case is particularly interesting and illustrates the diverse ways in which dialogue methods can be used. For simplicity, in our general presentation, we have characterised specific methods, such as appreciative inquiry, as subservient to or embedded in more general methods, such as the nominal group technique. In this case, however, appreciative inquiry and the question it addresses are clearly dominant, with the nominal group technique playing a subservient role in one part of the appreciative inquiry process.
While research integration, as we define it in this book, does not seem to be the usual way in which appreciative inquiry is used, it is possible to imagine its use by a research team, comprising disciplinary experts and stakeholders, to develop an overarching goal for a particular project. For example, one can imagine a team, such as the commissioners of the World Commission on Dams, using a method such as appreciative inquiry to develop the overarching goal of the commission to achieve ‘development effectiveness’, where ‘decision-making on water and energy management will align itself with the emerging global commitment to sustainable human development and on the equitable distribution of costs and benefits’ (see also Bammer 2008a; World Commission on Dams 2000:xxxiii). We are not suggesting that this is what the World Commission on Dams has really done, but it provides an example of research integration that readers might be able to identify with.
David L. Cooperrider coined the term ‘appreciative inquiry’ from his doctoral research at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, in the first half of the 1980s. The ideas and methods he developed were rapidly taken up and extended by others. Appreciative inquiry is still developing and being applied in many different sectors under the leadership of Cooperrider and others.
Appreciative Inquiry Commons n.d., Appreciative Inquiry Commons, Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, <http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/>
Cooperrider, D. L. and Whitney, D. K. 2005, Appreciative Inquiry: A positive revolution in change, Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, Calif.
Hammond, S. A. 1998, The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry, Second edition, Thin Book Publishing Company, Plano, Tex.
Hammond, S. A. and Royal, C. (eds) 1998, Lessons From the Field: Applying appreciative inquiry, Practical Press, Plano, Tex.
Watkins, J. M. and Mohr, B. J. 2001, Appreciative Inquiry: Change at the speed of imagination, Practicing Organization Development Series, Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer, San Francisco, Calif.