Research in Organizational Change and Development

Abraham B. (Rami) Shani, Debra A. Noumair, Abraham B. (Rami) Shani, Debra A. Noumair, Abraham B. Rami Shani, Debra A. Noumair

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781787144361
• eBook ISBN: 9781787149304
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: Business

2017 marks the silver anniversary of the Research in Organizational Change and Development series, founded in 1987 by Dick Woodman and Bill Pasmore, and currently edited by Rami Shani and Debra Noumair. This volume includes contributions from authors who have published in the first few volumes, contributions that examine the impact of the research published in the series on OD&C research, theoretical developments and practice. Highlights include contributions from Bill Pasmore and Dick Woodman as well as David Coghlan that focus on the essence and impact of the research reported in the last 24 volumes and possible research trajectories; Philip Mirvis and Mitchell Marks- the second recipients of the Pasmore-Woodman award (AOM 2016) on the highs and lows of co-researching; David Cooperrider on the evolution of Appreciative Inquiry since the foundation manuscript was published in ROCD Volume 1 (1987); Todd Jick & Kinthi Sturtevant who take stock of 30 years of change management, asking questions of and about its future and; Marvin Weisbord's reflection on forty years of being a scholarly-practitioner in the field.

THE GIFT OF NEW EYES: PERSONAL REFLECTIONS AFTER 30 YEARS OF APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY IN ORGANIZATIONAL LIFE

David Cooperrider

ABSTRACT

It’s been thirty years since the original articulation of “Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life” was written in collaboration with my remarkable mentor Suresh Srivastva (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987). That article – first published in Research in Organization Development and Change – generated more experimentation in the field, more academic excitement, and more innovation than anything we had ever written. As the passage of time has enabled me to look more closely at what was written, I feel both a deep satisfaction with the seed vision and scholarly logic offered for Appreciative Inquiry, as well as well as the enormous impact and continuing reverberation. Following the tradition of authors such as Carl Rogers who have re-issued their favorite works but have also added brief reflections on key points of emphasis, clarification, or editorial commentary I am presenting the article by David Cooperrider (myself) and the late Suresh Srivastva in its entirety, but also with new horizon insights. In particular I write with excitement and anticipation of a new OD – what my colleagues and I are calling the next “IPOD” that is, innovation-inspired positive OD that brings AI’s gift of new eyes together in common cause with several other movements in the human sciences: the strengths revolution in management; the positive pscyhology and positive organizational scholarship movements; the design thinking explosion; and the biomimicry field which is all about an appreciative eye toward billions of years of nature’s wisdom and innovation inspired by life.

Keywords: Action research; appreciative inquiry; organization development; social construction; design thinking; positive psychology

INTRODUCTION TO THE ARTICLE AND 2017 REFLECTIONS

It’s been more than thirty years since the original articulation of “Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life” was written, published first in my 1985 PhD defense, and then more formally two years later in collaboration with my mentor Suresh Srivastva (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987). That article generated more experimentation in the field, more academic excitement, and more innovation than anything we had ever written. As the passage of time has enabled me to look more closely at what was written, I feel both a deep satisfaction with the seed vision and scholarly logic offered for Appreciative Inquiry, as well as well as the enormous impact and reverberation. “Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is revolutionizing the field of organization development and change” said University of Michigan’s Bob Quinn, while Frank Barrett and Ronald Fry concluded that the original article was at “a magnitude perhaps not seen since that of Kurt Lewin’s classic article outlining action research.”

Indeed with AI’s contribution to the strengths revolution in management (see Buckingham’s 2006 historical tracing of strengths-based management to AI as one of its central roots) as well as the emergence of positive psychology (see AI’s reverberations in Cameron, Dutton, & Quinn, 2003; Seligman, 2010) there have been millions of people, organizations, and researchers, involved in advancing the new tools, concepts, and practices for doing appreciative inquiry and for bringing AI methodologies into organizations all over the world. Today AI’s approach to life-centric and strengths-based, instead of deficit-based and problematizing change, is succeeding many of the traditional analytic models in business and society. Writes Ken Gergen: “The growth and application of Appreciative Inquiry over the past two decades has been nothing short of phenomenal. It is arguably the most powerful process of positive organizational change ever devised” (Whitney, Trosten-Bloom, & Rader, 2010, p. 1).

Obviously it’s been thrill. There is, as Alfred North Whitehead so well articulated, an “adventure in ideas.” But if there is a slight bit of unease or disappointment it is this: very few of the hundreds of applications today go to the radical depth intended in the original writing, and in many ways the key concept of AI as a generative theory building method for the collaborative construction of reality has been glossed over in the rush to take the power of AI into the applied world of practice. Activists, paradoxically, have begun to emphasize practice over theory when the original intent was to emphasize and lift up theory (and knowing) as perhaps the most powerful form of practice we could ever devise. In a social world made up not of stable “things” but meanings and relationships, theory is practice and theory-building, as intervention, is a prime-time competency in OD work even though its scarcely mentioned in any global OD practice framework (see the 2017 OD Network competency wheel).

So the rest of this chapter is more than a re-print of the 1987 article. Following the tradition of authors such as Carl Rogers who have re-issued their favorite works but have also added brief reflections on key points of emphasis, clarification, or editorial commentary, I offer here both the early article by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva in its entirety, but also with contemporary reflections embedded. To be sure my comments will be brief and serve predominantly to add points of emphasis to ideas we may have too hurriedly introduced. And my comments – placed in indented and italicized format along the way – are informed by 30 years of new human science insight (e.g., the proliferation of research in Positive Psychology) and will emphasize key ideas that we may have not emphasized enough. For example Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life talks about the “miracle of life” and “mystery of social existence” as a root metaphor for an applied and creative human science that is more powerful than “the world as a problem-to-be-solved” if our knowledge-interest is to inspire our imaginative capacities. Reading the world gratefully so to speak – that is, embracing the sacredness or miracle of life on this planet for its intimations of something more and for what’s next or possible – is a fundamental part of the call for an appreciative inquiry of valuing those things of value worth valuing. It’s also a key to the spirit of inquiry that is moving from edges of the known to the unknown (mystery) in ways that opens minds, ignites genuine curiosity and, and inspires fresh images of possibility.

Of course there are also many contemporary debates and questions surrounding the idea of appreciative inquiry. For example, is appreciative inquiry about positivity – as so many people in positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship are quick to claim – or is it about generativity, that is ways of doing inquiry that opens our future to new possibilities and better worlds? Let me stress that I am not making or re-making the original argument here, but I am going to say that there are clarifications that may be unifying, valuing elements of both, and that the ambiguity might usefully push us forward toward added insight, enhanced logical consistency, and meaningfulness. For me, the long-term call and journey to understand the gift of appreciative inquiry – appreciative ways of knowing, appreciative interchange and ways of relating, and appreciative ways of designing – is still in its infancy and perhaps always will be as the numbers of AI co-authors and co-creators multiplies (see Fry & Barrett, 2001; Ludema, Whitney, Mohr, & Griffin, 2003; Watkins & Mohr, 2001; Whitney & Trosken-Bloom, 2010).

Indeed, AI is not a thing or a static concept, but an ongoing co-construction of reality; it’s the result of many voices, contexts and circumstances, planned and unplanned experiments, new discoveries and designs, narratives and cases, and unlimited imagination. The only thing I am certain of right now is this: as long as AI is constructed upon, practiced or inspired by the sense of the mystery and miracle of life on this planet, it will never become inert or lifeless. Why? Because life is alive – it’s always bursting out all over – and AI is about the search for “what gives life?” to living systems – organizations, communities, industries, countries, families, networks, societies, relationships, and our global living systems – when they are most alive and jointly flourishing in their inseparable and intimate interrelations. AI’s generativity lies precisely in its “inquiry inspired by life” north star and in its starting search not in current ideals (certainties) but in the lure of unexplored possibilities (those intimations of something more) where possibility and positive potential can be sensed in the texture of the actual (searching for our worlds’ life-giving best).

Let me offer one final note before launching into the substance of the original article. In 1984 Karl Wieck, then the editor of Administrative Science Quarterly proposed that if we could cut the paper in half that he would be very interested in seeing it published in ASQ. But Suresh and I both felt, while it would be an honor, that the integrity of the deeper inauguration of the concept of AI would be compromised. Did we make the right choice when we were invited to publish it in its entirety in the Bill Pasmore and Richard Woodman academic book series Research in Organization Development and Change? I believe we did. This research series has emerged, in our view, as the premier place of scholarship propelling the future of the field of OD.

For us it was a thrill to see what happened because of the 1987 article. Academics and practitioners, such as MIT’s Richard Beckhard as well as executives and leaders such as Kofi Annan soon responded to the ideas in ways we scarcely could have imagined. Kofi Annan, then Secretary General of the United Nations called on AI to transform the nature of UN world summits and said, “I would like to commend your innovative methodology of Appreciative Inquiry and to thank you for introducing it to the United Nations. Without this, it would have been very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to constructively engage so many leaders of business, civil society and government.” Likewise MIT’s Richard Beckhard, in his last speech at the Academy of Management said “Appreciative Inquiry is, in my view, an exciting breakthrough, one that signals a change in the way we think about change … We are looking at something very important – AI will be of enduring consequence and energizing innovation for the field. That’s my prediction. And that is why we are going to give it more attention in this session” (quoted in Jane Watkins and Bernard Mohr’s book tracing the history and impact of Appreciative Inquiry, 2001, p. xxv).

My hope is that these brief reflections will help us illuminate new potentials and possibilities for the future of positive organization development and call a younger generation of thinkers to once again ask the big questions, to courageously dare in scholarship, and to especially explore the power of the second word in the “Appreciative” and “Inquiry” duet. Appreciation is about valuing the “life-giving” in ways that serve to inspire our co-constructed future. Inquiry is the experience of mystery, moving beyond the edge of the known to the unknown, which then changes our lives. Taken together, where appreciation and inquiry are wonderfully entangled, we experience knowledge that’s not inert but alive, as well as an ever-expansive inauguration of our world to new possibilities. In many ways I’ve begun to question today whether there can even be inquiry where there is no appreciation, valuing, or amazement – what the Greeks called thaumazein – the borderline between wonderment and admiration.

Finally it is hoped that my brief reflections offered in this chapter will help shed light on the positive future of OD and to re-establish AI’s call for generating knowledge of consequence, especially for a younger generation of thinkers who I urge to once again ask the big questions, to courageously dare in scholarship, and to open wide new vistas and directions for appreciative inquiry as a generative theory discipline.

APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY IN ORGANIZATIONAL LIFE*

David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva

ABSTRACT

This article presents a conceptual refigurationy of action-research based on a “sociorationalist” view of science. The position that is developed can be summarized as follows: For action-research to reach its potential as a vehicle for social innovation it needs to begin advancing theoretical knowledge of consequence; that good theory may be one of the best means human beings have for affecting change in a postindustrial world; that the discipline’s steadfast commitment to a problem solving view of the world acts as a primary constraint on its imagination and contribution to knowledge; that appreciative inquiry represents a viable complement to conventional forms of action-research; and finally, that through our assumptions and choice of method we largely create the world we later discover.

We are sometime truly to see our life as positive, not negative, as made up of continuous willing, not of constraints and prohibition.

–Mary Parker Follett.

We are steadily forgetting how to dream; in historical terms, the mathematicist and technicist dimensions of Platonism have conquered the poetical, mythical, and rhetorical context of analysis. We are forgetting how to be reasonable in nonmathematical dialects.

-Stanley Rosen.

*This chapter presents the original article---Cooperrider, D. and Srivastva, S., (1987). “Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life.” In R. Woodman and W. Pasmore (eds.), Research in organizational change and development, Volume 1, pp. 129-169—and it weaves in 2017 reflections and draws from recent publications such as Inquiring Into Appreciative Inquiry: A Conversation With David Cooperrider and Ronald Fry, in Management Inquiry, first published January 10th, 2017 and also Cooperrider, D.L et al (2013) Organizational Generativity: The Appreciative Inquiry Summit and a Scholarship of Transformation. Volume #4 in Advances in Appreciative Inquiry. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter presents a conceptual reconfiguration of action research. In it we shall argue for a multidimensional view of action-research, which seeks to both generate theory and develop organizations. The chapter begins with the observation that action-research has become increasingly rationalized and enculturated to the point where it risks becoming little more than a crude empiricism imprisoned in a deficiency mode of thought. In its conventional unidimensional form action research has largely failed as an instrument for advancing social knowledge of consequence and has not, therefore, achieved its potential as a vehicle for human development and social-organizational transformation. While the literature consistently signals the worth of action-research as a managerial tool for problem solving (“first-order” incremental change), it is conspicuously quiet concerning reports of discontinuous change of the “second order” where organizational paradigms, norms, ideologies, or values are transformed in fundamental ways (Watzlawick, et al., 1974).

In the course of this chapter we shall touch broadly upon a number of interrelated concerns--scientific, metaphysical, normative, and pragmatic. Linking these streams is an underlying conviction that action-research has the potential to be to the postindustrial era what “scientific management” was to the industrial. Just as scientific management provided the philosophical and methodological legitimacy required to support the bureaucratic organizational form (Clegg and Dunkerley, 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• The Future of Research and Practice in Organizational Change and Development
• Taking Stock of 30 Years of Change Management: Is It Time for a Reboot?
• The Gift of New Eyes: Personal Reflections after 30 Years of Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life
• How Organizational Transformation Has Been Continuously Changing and Not Changing
• Co-Researching and – Doing M&A Integration: Crossing the Scholar-Practitioner Divide
• X-Ray Vision at Work: Seeing Inside Organizational Life
• Achieving Strategic Change through Performance Management: The Role of Identity Threat
• Organizational Change and Ambidexterity in Higher Education: A Case Study of Institutional Merger
• Learning to Fly – And Other Life Lessons☆
• How Might We Learn about the Philosophy of ODC Research from 24 Volumes of ROCD? An Invitation to Interiority
• About the Contributors