Making changes is not easy. Trying to work on fixing something that isn’t broken is, for many people or organizations, something that’s out of reach, an obstacle, or even infeasible due to the amount of time it takes, as well as the strong beliefs on both sides of the spectrum—that is, those who try to enact change, and those who oppose it. No matter the number of teamwork sessions that you attend with your workgroup, or group discussions that you hold when trying to enact some of these changes, you can never seem to reach a consensus.

If a change in the workplace is something you’ve yet to grasp, and you’re running out of options when trying to bring your team together, then you might need to approach the problem from a different angle. Particularly, while most people can agree upon a goal or an end-objective, what they usually defer on is the means to reach their objective. In other words, we all know what we gotta do; we just don’t know how to go about it.

If this is something you’re struggling with, then you could give Appreciative Inquiry a try and see if you can use it to finally reach a consensus with your team.

What is Appreciative Inquiry?

When you’re trying to enact a change in the workplace, especially in the larger ones, it is necessary to establish a system that considers every opinion, and then uses them to create the best course of action where all the parties involved can reach a common objective. In practice, what Appreciative Inquiry boils down to is identifying the group’s core strengths, and using these to enact positive changes to reduce its negative aspects. In a sense, it consists of enacting changes through positive means, as opposed to forcefully making changes against the wills of some of those involved, just because the majority voted in favor.

This method was first developed in 1987 by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, researchers in the Case Western Reserve University’s department of organizational behavior. The creators refer to their method as “a way to question what things currently are, in order to imagine what they could be.” They explain that organizations are both built and destroyed through the spoken word, as these constructs can shift the view and outlook of an organization for either good or bad. Furthermore, they claim that the success of a business hinges heavily on people’s imagination for adopting positive policies, as well as the agreements between all the parties involved.

However, in order to envision a positive future for the company, it is first necessary to establish a common ground where discussion between every involved organizer (employees, stakeholders, or board of directors, among others) can take place. Once that’s done, the group can begin asking questions about the company’s strengths and use this dialog to orient the solutions to continue improving the positive aspects in an effort to surpass the negatives of their business.

This method exists in direct contrast to those of the majority of other companies in the ’80s, which focused exclusively on negative questions such as “what’s the problem?”, “what can be improved?” or even “what needs to be fixed?” All of these questions are focused around company deficiencies and help to view the issues as negatives instead of growth opportunities. Even the models that view problems as “challenges” adopt this model. Appreciative Inquiry tries to shift the perspective to the company’s strengths, highlighting the best that the company has to offer, and bringing solutions to where there were only used to be issues and complaints.

In order to enact positive change in the workplace, Appreciative Inquiry establishes the following principles:

• “The constructionist principle proposes that what we believe to be true determines what we do, and thought and action emerge from relationships. Through the language and discourse of day to day interactions, people co-construct the organizations they inhabit. The purpose of inquiry is to stimulate new ideas, stories, and images that generate new possibilities for action.
• “The principle of simultaneity proposes that as we inquire into human systems we change them and the seeds of change, the things people think and talk about, what they discover and learn, are implicit in the very first questions asked. Questions are never neutral, they are fateful, and social systems move in the direction of the questions they most persistently and passionately discuss.
• “The poetic principle proposes that organizational life is expressed in the stories people tell each other every day, and the story of the organization is constantly being co-authored. The words and topics chosen for inquiry have an impact far beyond just the words themselves. They invoke sentiments, understandings, and worlds of meaning. In all phases of the inquiry, an effort is put into using words that point to, enliven, and inspire the best in people.
• “The anticipatory principle posits that what we do today is guided by our image of the future. Human systems are forever projecting ahead of themselves a horizon of expectation that brings the future powerfully into the present as a mobilizing agent. Appreciative inquiry uses artful creation of positive imagery on a collective basis to refashion anticipatory reality.
• “The positive principle proposes that momentum and sustainable change requires positive affect and social bonding. Sentiments like hope, excitement, inspiration, camaraderie and joy increase creativity, openness to new ideas and people, and cognitive flexibility. They also promote the strong connections and relationships between people, particularly between groups in conflict, required for collective inquiry and change.”

By exercising these five principles, a workgroup can highlight the best of what the company has to offer, shift the focus of a discussion to more positive matters, and provide solutions to problems that, through deficiency models, proved unsolvable.