Appreciative Inquiry Quotes & Illustrative Stories
Last updated & posted 10-9-08
The Constructionist Principle
The constructionist principle conceptually underlies the other principles in AI. Its essential premise is this: life experience doesn’t just happen to us, we actually create it together. Social constructionism suggests that there is no “true reality” out there.
“Meaning is made in conversation, reality is created in communication, and knowledge is generated through social interaction….Language is the vehicle through which we create our understanding of the world.”
Diana Whitney & Amanda Trosten-Bloom
“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
Anais Nin
“We don’t live in a world of reality, we live in a world of perceptions.”
Gerard J. Simmons
“We are each made and imagined in the eyes of one another.”
David Cooperrider
“Speak only that which you choose to have come into manifestation now and continuously.”
Robert Tennyson Stevenson
“What I see is not what I am looking at but what I am looking with. And so my first and principal duty…is to find my eyes of love.”
Dan Jones
“The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths to it are not found but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.”
John Schaar
The Poetic Principle
The Poetic Principle suggests, “pasts, presents, or futures are endless sources of learning, inspiration, or interpretation—precisely like, for example, the endless interpretic possibilities in a good piece of poetry or a biblical text.”
We can find whatever we want in a person or situation: good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly. What we choose to focus on creates our reality. The more attention we give to something, the more it expands as part of our experience.
There is a story of a Cherokee elder sitting with his grandchildren. He says to them, “In every life there is a terrible fight – a fight between two wolves. One is evil: he is fear, anger, envy, greed, arrogance, self-pity, resentment, and deceit. The other is good: joy, serenity, humility, confidence, generosity, truth, gentleness, and compassion.” And one of the children asks, “Grandfather, which wolf will win?” The elder looks him in the eye and says, “The one you feed.”
“If you fight terrorism, it’s based in fear. If you promote peace, it’s based in hope.”
Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea
“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”Winston Churchill
“The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”
Henry Miller
“The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but seeing with new eyes.”
Marcel Proust
Focusing on what we do want will create more of it, while focusing on what we don’t want will create more of that as well.
Jacqueline Bascobert Kelm
A mother was driving her 5-year old son to school. As they approached a stop-light, the woman in the convertible in front of them stood up and waved – totally naked. The mother gasped, not sure what to say to her son. The boy exclaimed, “Mommy, that lady is not wearing her seat belt!”
The real voyage of discovery consists
not is seeking new landscapes,
but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust
“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”
John Lennon
“It’s not ‘seeing is believing;’ it’s ‘believing is seeing.”
The Santa Clause II
“If you focus on problems, you find more problems. If you focus on successes, you find more successes.”
Mac Odell
“Thus the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.”
Schopenhauer
“Where do you want to go today?”™
Microsoft ad
“I keep my mind focused on peace, harmony, health, love and abundance. Then, I can’t be distracted by doubt, anxiety or fear.”
Edith Armstrong
“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”
Ronald Laing
The Simultaneity Principle
The Simultaneity Principle rests on the power of inquiry, and suggests that change begins the moment we ask a question. Inquiry and change are simultaneous. The minute we ask the question, change begins. That’s why the process begins with interviews and questions. How we phrase those questions is key, which is why AI also involves the mobilization of inquiry through the crafting of the “unconditional positive question.”
“Quality questions create a quality life.”
Anthony Robbins
“You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.”
Naguib Mahfouz (Nobel Prize Winner)
The Anticipatory Principle
The Anticipatory Principle suggests that the images we create in our minds about the future guide our present actions and create that very future.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather the wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
Antoine de Saint Exupery
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Albert Einstein
“You have to go and fetch the future. It’s not coming towards you, it’s running awy.”
Zulu Proverb
“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.”
Yogi Berra
The Positive Principle
The Positive Principle states, “Momentum for change requires large amounts of positive affect and social bonding – things like hope, excitement, inspiration, caring, camaraderie, sense of urgent purpose, and sheer joy in creating something meaningful together.” Positive emotion is essential for growth and optimal functioning. We’re more creative and better at problem solving when we’re happy.
The final piece of this principle is that of the Positive Core. Everyone and every situation has a positive core. Every single one. We must be deliberative in seeking it out.
“A pile of rocks ceases to be rocks when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
“When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves.”
William Arthur Ward
“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”
James Branch Cabell
“Everybody has good in them. Even the worst of men have got to have some scrap of goodness at the bottom of their hearts, I really believe that. In ‘Six Billion Others’ I want to show how these people live and what they feel, but I also want to pick up that bit of good in us all.”
Yann Arthus-Bertrand
Change
“We must be the change we wish to see in the world.”
Gandhi
“It is said that people resist change; my own experience is that people are attracted to change. People want to understand the truth, to help patients and residents, and most of all to do something creative and even beautiful. Transitions are hard, but change is not. Getting from here to there is hard, but upon arrival life can be better than ever.”
David C. Leach, M.D.
“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”
Plato
“You cannot make something happen, but you can create a space in which what you want is more likely to happen.”
Chinese Proverb
“Prepare your mind to receive the best that life has to offer.”
Ernest Holmes
“If we all did the things we are capable of doing we would literally astound ourselves.”
Thomas Alva Edison
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Margaret Mead
“Judging by what I have learned about men and women, I am convinced that far more idealistic aspiration exists than is ever evident. Just as the rivers we see are much less numerous than the underground streams, so the idealism that is visible is minor compared to what men and women carry in their hearts, unreleased or scarcely released. Mankind is waiting and longing for those who can accomplish the task of untying what is knotted and bringing the underground waters to the surface.”
Albert Schweitzer
“[James Mageria of Vision Africa] has stated that Africa does not need to be fixed. It needs constant re-affirmation. The most important resource we have for generating constructive change in Africa is our cooperative imagination and mind, and our capacity to unleash the imagination and mind of communities, churches, governments and individuals.”
Sarone Ole Sena
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
Albert Einstein
“The man who really wants something finds a way; the other man finds an excuse.”
E.C. Mckenzie
David Cooperrider
“We need to discover the root causes of success rather than the root causes of failure.”
David Cooperrider
“Why is uninhibited wonder something we generally restrict to children? If doing good inquiry is at the heart of organization development, why then so little talk of things like awe, curiosity, veneration, surprise, delight, amazement, and wonder — in short, everything that serves to infuse what OD has traditionally referred to as the “spirit of inquiry.”
David Cooperrider
“Individuals and organizations thrive when people see the best in themselves, share their dreams and concerns in a positive way, and when they join their voices in the same direction in order to create, not only new worlds, but better worlds.”
David Cooperrider
“We have reached “the end of problem solving” as a mode of inquiry capable of inspiring, mobilizing and sustaining human system change, and the future of organization development belongs to methods that affirm, compel and accelerate anticipatory learning involving larger and larger levels of collectivity.”
David Cooperrider
“The arduous task of intervention will give way to the speed of imagination and innovation; and instead of negation, criticism, and spiraling diagnosis, there will be discovery, dream and design. … And the metaphor speaking best to our primary task and role — “the child as the agent of inquiry” — is one where wonder, learning, and the dialogical imagination will be modus operandi.”
David Cooperrider
“The most inspiring stories, the most passion-filled data, the most textured and well-illustrated example, the most daring images of possibility — were are conducted by the children. … The intergenerational dynamic of the dialogue made the data collection stage soar. One is reminded of Margaret Mead’s hypothesis that the best societal learning has always occurred when three generations come together in contexts of discovery and valuing — the child, the elder, and the middle adult. Where appreciation is alive and generations are re-connected through inquiry, hope grows.”
David Cooperrider
“I have found that it does not help, in the long run, to begin my inquiries from the standpoint of the world as a problem to be solved. I am more effective, quite simply, as long as I can retain the spirit of inquiry of the everlasting beginner.”
David Cooperrider
“The problem-solving approach directs attention to the “worst of what is,” constantly examining what is wrong with the organization. The assumption is that if the problems are fixed, then the desired future will automatically unfold. In problem solving it is assumed that something is broken, fragmented, not whole, and that it needs to be fixed. Thus the function of problem solving is to integrate, stabilize, and help raise to its full potential the workings of the status quo. By definition, a problem implies that one already has knowledge of what “should be;” thus one’s research is guided by an instrumental purpose tied to what is already known. In this sense, problem solving tends to be inherently conservative; as a form of research it tends to produce and reproduce a universe of knowledge that remains sealed.”
David Cooperrider
Appreciative Inquiry
“Appreciative inquiry can get you such better results than seeking out and solving problems. That’s an interesting concept for me — and I imagine for most of you — because telephone companies are among the best problem solvers in the world. We trouble shoot everything. We concentrate enormous resources on correcting problems that have relatively minor impact on our overall service performance. When used continually and over a long period of time, this approach can lead to a negative culture. If you combine a negative culture with all the challenges we face today, it would be easy to convince ourselves that we have too many problems to overcome — to slip into a paralyzing sense of hopelessness.
And yet if we flip the coin, we have so much to be excited about. … We can if we just turn ourselves around and start looking at our jobs — and ourselves — differently; if we kill negative talk and celebrate our successes. … In the long run, what is more likely to be more useful: Demoralizing a successful workforce by concentrating on their failures or helping them over their lasts few hurdles by building a bridge with their successes?”
Thomas WhitePresident, GTE Telephone Operations
“The appreciative paradigm, for many, is culturally at odds with the popular negativism and professional vocabularies of deficit that permeate society.”
David Cooperrider
“Appreciative Inquiry is an articulated theory that rationalizes and reinforces the habit of mind that moves through the world in a generative frame, seeking and finding images of the possible, rather than scenes of disaster and despair.”
Jane Magruder Watkins
“Think of Appreciative Inquiry as a new conversation, as a search engine for the positive core of a system, as a convergence zone or “space” creating a multiplier effect in the area of human imagination and intellectual capital.”
David Cooperrider
Other Gems
“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.”
Kierkegaard
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Albert Einstein
“The sense of wonder, that is our sixth sense.”
D.H. Lawrence
“Hope sees the invisible, feels the intangible and achieves the impossible.”
Charles Caleb Colton
“We often spend so much time coping with problems along our path that we only have a dim or even inaccurate view of what’s really important to us.”
Peter Senge
