People who want to try out a new set of principles usually will bring these principles into an existing method they already know. Peggy Holman, Tom Devane and Steve Cady has collected a large number of methods and categorized them into five different kinds of methods in their book The Change Handbook. All methods can be used at different numbers of people in different contexts. In general we have individual learning and collective learning and organizational learning and community learning. I have collected them in this illustration.

• Renewal methods intend to create a new set of solutions
• Improvement methods intend to improve the present set of solutions
• Structuring methods intend to change the existing structures
• All-round methods can be used for all these three intentions
• Support methods intends to enhance the effect of the other methods

Appreciative Inquiry can be used as an ingredient in all methods in the world with good results. It will always involve creating a unique method that fits with the specific purpose and group of participants if you want to get the best out of the principles.

The virus of Appreciative Inquiry is still spreading. There is signs that the epidemy is becoming worldwide. Authorities and experts are still trying to find a cure or at least a vaccine that will make it possible for the human species to keep on living a normal and productive life.

Appreciative Inquiry is mutating and finding new ways of infecting new victims. AI is not a virus like a influenza even though it has many similarities. One of the similarities is that the virus infects a human being, the human body produces enormous numbers of new virus, which are spread to other human beings. AI does the same. The patient becomes a factory that produce and spread AI.

Most viruses make the infected people feel bad, so people try to recover from the infection. AI makes most people feel better, which mean that the infection last for a long time, because the patient does not do anything to remedy this unnatural state of mind. Some patients seem to accept to have the infection for the rest of their lives. There is even examples of some of them infecting other people on purpose.

Some reports describe AI as a psychosis, where the patient believes in the AI-induced mental state of well-being so strongly that it becomes their reality. As with other kinds of psychosis this is an illusion, but the patients insists on staying in this illusion and act as if it was true.

Economists are beginning to warn against a new global crisis. Many industries are based on real problems, like conflicts, crime and distrust. The economists warn that these pillars in society will loose their business and that all the shareholders will loose their savings.

Appreciative Inquiry may be the worst epidemy in human history and there is reason to fear that life as we know it will end. Unfortunately many people do not take the warnings seriously, so they experiment with AI and some irresponsible people even introduce AI to our children in public places. Authorities and experts warn you against these people and ask you to report them.

David was reminded of old stories told by the well known and respected mage Schweitzer about a special way of governing a realm called “reverence of life”. David discovered he was much more exited, when he was thinking about the “Amazing Life Forces” than when he was thinking about the “Evil Wrongness”.

With a beating heart he gathered the two rulers of the realms and suggested that he could change his Quest. Instead of a Quest where he had to locate the Evil Wrongness and defeat it, he suggested a Quest where he had to locate the Amazing Life Forces and learn how to master them.

After a long deliberation the two rulers agreed that David could go on the Quest he really yearned for.

During the long Quest David had to report to the rulers and in one of his reports he baptises his discoveries Apprecitiave Inquiry.

David had stumbled on an old truth, here told in the words of one of the Ancients:

“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. This one was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and apart from him nothing came into being. What came into being in him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light appears in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.”

David finished his Quest for the Amazing Life Forces and went through the next part of his apprenticeship. He had to record his experiences and findings in a Scroll mostly in isolation from the rest of the world. David knew that a good Scroll should present it’s findings as something new and exiting, not as a copy of things written in old Scrolls. He also knew he had to present his findings in front of the Knights of Academic Endeavour as part of his initiation as a Knight.

David was proud of his work and so was the rulers of the two realms. The people of the realm of Praxis had been happy with his findings and his insight into their lives. So he was ready for the last part of his apprenticeship: The solo performance in front of the Knights of Academic Endeavour.

He was not ready for the reactions of the Knights. They could not believe their own ears. Here was an apprentice who did not defeat the Evil Wrongness as part of his Quest, he did not even meet it! This young man had the audacity to suggest that it is possible to learn without the hardship and courage involved in defeating the Evil Wrongness. They were really sceptical, which they did not keep to themselves. This was completely ridiculous som several of them were laughing and rediculing David’s work.

David was awarded his knighthood, but it was not the happy occasion he had hoped for.

In the back of the room there was a few apprentices and several of the inhabitants of Praxis, who did not understand the reaction of the Knights and who valued Davids work. They invited David to help them understand his work and his methods. In the realm of Academic Endeavour Davids ideas was largely forgotten for over twenty years. In the realm of Praxis and among the young apprentices, Davids work was not forgotten. And new realms listened to David. Even the realm of Spiritual Guardians David was invited to help them to open a dialogue on how to make it possible for religions and cultures to live peacefully together.

Mark Turner wrote a book called The literary mind where he suggests that the human brain work with the literal stories and not with abstract versions of the stories. When we tell these stories we relive them and have access to the smells, the emotions, the visual memories and all the other senses. You can almost see on a person when she relives the story. this make it important that people tell their own stories. It is almost impossible for another person to relate the stories in the same way. All the details disappear and the best way to remove all these details from the story is to relate the abstract conclusions.

The literary mind does not store the stories completely as they were experienced. They tend to blend with other stories that are connected to the story about a new experience. In an Appreciative Inquiry all the participants are almost showered with stories that will blend with the stories they already have. Normally we have to learn from our experience but we can learn form other peoples stories if they are told in the right way. Appreciative Inquiry creates a storytelling with a high intensity, where everyone has the possibility to learn very fast.

In Positive deviance you do the same in a more structured way. You collect the Positive deviances from several different contexts in order to find better sets of solutions to the challenges you have in your own organization or community.

Today you can share these stories with videorecordings and make a collection of different stories about the same topic. A good example is The World Challenge presented by BBC on http://theworldchallenge.co.uk/

• What it means to be human and have human aspirations
• How many resources we have each of us and together if we dare showing each other our best performance and what we can do together if we choose to go for the best possible right now and in the future
• How fantastic results we already have created togetherr and individually
• How much we appreciate the contributions of the individual and the community
• How much we appreciative the inspiration from other individuals and communites all over the world
• How much we have learned as a species and how much we know about taking good care of humankind and all other living beings
• How much we still can learn, if we boldly go where no man has gone before
• How much better a set of solutions is when we change them together
• How much we really can do if we take our own faith in our own hands even when we are facing hardship
• How much we can learn from crisis if we really want to become good at learning
• How much more useful our words and skills in communication can become

Some of these differences are inspiring, but some of them are misunderstandings and in the worst case these stories become mass misunderstandings.

I this post I will collect some of the worst  mass misunderstandings I have met. If you know more mass misunderstandings do not hesitate to add a comment.

Appreciative Inquiry can only be used in positive situations

There are hundreds of examples on how to apply Appreciative Inquiry in conflicts, crisis and emotionally tough situations. Gervase Bushe wrote the book Clear Leadership based on situations where sense making goes wrong in organizations. He still studied the lifegiving forces and how to master them. And he dealt with situations of extraordinary achievement in the way Appreciative Inquiry does when it works best:

• Looking at successes and learn from them and
• Looking for the best imaginable potential in the situations and learn how to master this potential

Gervase Bushe also points to the fact that the main problem for leaders – including consultants and coaches – is to know their own reactions to things they do not like. So read and learn from Clear Leadership.

Peter Lang once told me this story:

I was counseling a couple who had a big challenge. The ex-wife came to their door and asked to see her biological children again. The ex-wife were just released from prison and now she wanted to see her children again. She went to prison because she had tried to kill the new wife with a knife. Peter asked: “What happened in the moment when the ex-wife stopped killing you?”

This is too simple

The general approach is easy and simple. An old advice is: Keep it simple sweetie. You should keep your practice as simple as possible. Simple ideas usually create complicated solutions that leads people to make mistakes. Then you improve the solutions so they can handle these mistakes and end up with very complicated solutions. So to apply Appreciative you will need to have a set of complicated and new ideas. Effectiveness and efficiency in Appreciative Inquiry is more connected to “feeling alive and well” than technical measurements. So instead of measuring stress you will have to work with promotion of Well-being.

Changing you own mindset in these fundamental ways is hard work. The good news is that you will enjoy the learning process because it is lifegiving.

The 4D model is the model

The 4D model is just one model of how to understand the logical concepts and connections in Appreciative Inquiry. Imagine Chicago use a model with these concepts and connections.

They usually presented the sequence in the model as Understanding, Imagining and Creating. But they added the prinicples of dialogue, new curriculum and connections to their model. Appreciative Inquiry can be combined with all existing models, so there is no true model of inquiry. You can even apply it in ways that emotionally look more like a drepression than lifegiving.

You need to have a personality as a saint in order to apply Appreciative Inquiry

Every one can apply Apprecitive Inquiry to anything they want to improve. The starting point in Appreciative Inquiry is wondering about something: “Is this really the best we can do?” This includes having a strong ability to find problems. Most saints I have heard about has this ability and the will to do something about it. It is the combination of these abilities that are important if you want to apply Appreciative Inquiry. And you probably have to enjoy lifegiving forces and like to learn how to use them in your practice.

Most of the best practitioners of Appreciative Inquiry I have met believe in Appreciative Inquiry, so they can look like saints when they are on stage. Off stage they look and behave a lot like normal people with different preferences of how to live life. If someone is doing harm to the community you need to confront them with the harmful behaviour and help them back into the community. In Greenland the laws were designed in order to help ciminals to return to the community. So the prison door is not locked. The prisoner can still participate in the activities of the community and everyone is hoping for a stronger person to return to normal life. Are they saints? No but they apply one of the slogans from Imagine Chicago: In Gods economy, noone is waisted.

We tried Appreciative Inquiry and it does not work

Many people have tried to apply Appreciative Inquiry into their practice by imitating something they heard, read or saw without beginning to apply it full scale. Appreciative Inquiry takes some time to learn. It is connected to changes in your behaviour in interactions with other people. These changes changes the patterns of interactions you participate in. So you have to do it with people and get the necessary feedback so you can adjust your practice. When you start doing something else you offer a new space for the other people to act into. Try a small thing and see what happens.

One small story from 25 years of practice may inspire you: A CEO who usually came to the meeting and demanded that the other participants put the problems on the table so they could discuss them, started to arrive to the meeting and said. “Which successes have you had since we met the last time?” at the end of the meeting he said. “Is there anything you need me to take care of?” This small change was noticed and everyone was asking “What happened to Tom?”

What happened was that Tom changed a ritual, that is repeated over and over in an organization. Rituals are one of the best ways to learn something, simply because you practice it over and over. If you want Apprecative Inquiry to work for you you simply have to practice it in rituals that you already participate in or create new rituals.

If it does not produce the changes you want you can change your rituals again.

Appreciative Inquiry is a religion

According to Wikipedia a religion is a system of human thought which usually includes a set of narratives, symbols, beliefs and practices that give meaning to the practitioner’s experiences of life through reference to a higher power, deity or deities, or ultimate truth.

Guilty as charged if this definition is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Since Appreciative Inquiry came out of a search for lifegiving factors and an intention to learn to master these factors so well that you can live a life filled with extraordinary achievement, it must remind most people of a religion.

The higher power is human life and achievement, which makes it a special kind of religion. One of the application of Appreciative Inquiry is The United Religions Initiative. It was designed to answer this challenge: I we want peace among nations, we need to have peace among religions and that requires dialogue between religions.

If this is the higher truth we are seeking to achive by applying Appreciative Inquiry, then I am a believer this higher truth. I know some religions who does not have this at the heart of their practices. The opening question in a session in United Religions Initiative was: “What are the best spiritual experiences you have had?” So I believe Appreciative Inquiry creates spiritual experiences, but to me this is not necessary a religious belief.

Maybe Appreciative Inquiry is a spiritual movement?

Or it is a practice based on the declaration of human duties, La Déclaration des devoirs de l’homme et du citoyen, passed by the French Parliament august 22 1795, where you can read this:

“All the duties of human beings and citizens, which are serious in nature and at their core, can be derived from these two principles:

1. Do not do unto others, what you do not want them to do to you
2. Always do to others the good, you want to receive yourself”

Human rights are empty without human duties. So maybe Appreciative Inquiry is just introducing the human duties we need to know and follow in order to fulfil the human rights. One large lifegiving factor in a human life is to you are allowed to find better ways of living in a community that supports these ways of living as long as they are not harmful to others.

Maybe we even have to include these principles in the principles of Appreciative Inquiry, when we talk about it? Research into high performance teams show that one of the most important practices is to be happy when other people succeed. It is much easier if you helped them to succeed.

Many managers have been very surprised when there are four very different practices that meet the same technical standards. A new concept is changing this to be a blessing. It has to do with the mathematics of knowledge sharing and creating.

If you and I both have one apple and we give the other an apple, both of us will still have one apple. If we both have one idea and one practice and we exchange ideas and practices, we both have two ideas and two practices. Then we can use the inspiration to find even better practices that fit into our own practice.

You do it every day when you see someone doing something smart. You imitate the best and adjust it so it fit into your own practice. This approach is called Positive Deviance and the examples Positive Deviations.

This is also what you get when you ask people Appreciative Questions. You get the Positive Deviations and you can improve your own practice immediately. You can se more about this approach at http://www.positivedeviance.org/

The blog is public, so everyone can follow your contributions.

Now some people claim that Appreciative Inquiry has to be LIVED and that you need to BE Appreciative Inquiry to facilitate Appreciative processes and train people in Appreciative Inquiry.

This reminds me of an old book called The Aquarian Conspiracy by Marilyn Ferguson. She says we have five ways of handling change our worldview:

1. Refuse the change
2. Creating an exception to the rule
3. Enter a gradual change, which we normally do not notice ourselves
4. Convert to another worldview
5. Finding a new perspective that integrates the past experience and the new worldview

It is hard to experience how Appreciative Inquiry work on yourself and other people and stay unaffected. But you need to start practicing to go beyond step 2. I was impressed with what I saw and felt the first time I met Appreciative Inquiry. So I started practicing and and became very good at using it and training people in Apprecitive Inquiry.

I need to believe in Appreciative in order to spread the practice. I have to believe it so much that I can persuade people that I believe in it. I believe Appreciative Inquiry is very useful, but I never converted. I integrated it into an irreverent new perspective. I love the hymn of Appreciative Inquiry, ”Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” by Johnny Mercer

Most of the converts I have met tend to become fundamentalist and that is not really what I want to promote by spreading Appreciative Inquiry. I have seen too many people who was unable to be Appreciative in the moment. They need some help before they are able to move on in an Appreciative way. And I know lots of people who live happy and prosperous lives without appreciating everything.

Here is a rap (Rythm and Poetry) I made once with a group of people:

Now it is enough
No more grumbling
Obama and Osama are dancing salsa in a world filled with peace
We are all joining in and dance in streets filled with gold
The jews embraces their inner Muslim
While the pope is playing the violin

Were you able to appreciate the metaphors?

If you were I think you have mastered the irreverence that is one of the main things you need to master if you want to live Appreciative Inquiry. Irreverence is at the heart of good humour.

I am confident that you can master Appreciative Inquiry without converting, you just have to practice Appreciative rituals. You will begin to change because you want to, not because you have to.  Appreciative Inquiry works best if it is self-directed learning.

The original principles presented by David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney in “Collaborating for change: Appreciative Inquiry”, 1999 were:

• The constructionist principle – saying that learning takes place in social interaction
• The principle of simultaneity – saying that change starts immediately, not after a long decision making process
• The poetic principle – saying that organizations can change themselves by changing the stories about themselves
• The anticipatory principle – saying that people react from their positive expectations or images of the future
• The positive principle – saying that most of us need to remind ourselves that we normally look a little too negative at things

Later the principles has been refined and expanded, but the five original principles are still important. Most importantly they have to be applied at the same time.

Personally I would include the principle of dialogue. It is dialogue that makes Appreciative Inquiry work especially if the dialogue is aimed at creating a generative metaphor. You probably know two examples of generative metaphors: “I have a dream!” by Martin Luther King and “We want to send a man to the moon and bring him back safely before the end of the decade!” by John F. Kennedy.

David Cooperrider and Frank Barrett introduced the concept of a generative metaphor in “Generative Metaphor Intervention: A New Approach for Working with Systems Divided by Conflict and Caught in Defensive Perception” in 2001.