In this episode of the Engaging Leader podcast, Jesse Lahey and guest Jonathan Raymond about rethinking accountability as a means of helping people unlock their inner strengths (audio).
In this comprehensive article Catherine Moore provides a background on the development of Appreciative Inquiry (AI), the theory behind it, models, examples of it in practice, and a collection of more readings, videos, and presentations about AI.
The fundamental idea behind AI is that over time, it has become increasingly common for organizations to approach change and growth from a problem-solving perspective. As firms aim to improve efficiency, survive, perform better, and boost competitiveness, AI proponents argue that there has come to be an unhealthy over-emphasis on “fixing what’s wrong”—a deficit-based approach.
AI arose as a challenge to these ingrained assumptions and proposed that organizations can benefit instead from what is called a strengths-based or affirmative approach (Hammond, 2013). This affirmative approach, in turn, assumes that each human system has a positive core of strengths.
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