Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Approach to Change

Driving transformation through co-creation

Driving transformation through co-creation.

Culture is a co-created experience — Photo by James Wainscoat/ Unsplash

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

— Steve Jobs

Organizations Are Not a Problem to be Solved

Change management has a negative reputation — it’s often seen as synonymous with a reorganization, downsizing, restructuring, merger, and more.

However, the biggest problem with change management is the focus on what’s broken — it approaches organizations as something to be fixed.

What’s not working?

The traditional problem-solving approach to change management — finding what is wrong and developing solutions to fix the problems — seeds a negative mindset. It makes people focus on what’s broken. Time is spent rehashing issues and what caused them.

After a while, the deficit-based view sucks everyone’s energy — there are blame and division rather than motivation and engagement. Teammates think they are…