Many people, especially students, have asked me for some of the earliest writings on Appreciative Inquiry. I will be posting many articles, but this is the first. Its really a book–over 320 pages–and it was the first paper, writing, or book ever written on the theory and practice of Appreciative Inquiry. It was my PhD dissertation, successfully defended August 19th, 1985 at Case Western Reserve University’s PhD program in Organizational Behavior. Please be sure to read the many acknowledgements when you download the full dissertation in its entirety. I was blessed with such an intellectually advanced dissertation committee–Suresh Srivastva, my brilliant chair, and Ron Fry, Eric Neilsen, and Paul Salipante– and with student colleagues such as Dennis O’Conner, Harlow Cohen, Allen Jensen, Veronica Hopper and Frank Barrett–everyone providing intellectual challenge, support, and advice. The dissertation lead to many articles and projects and perhaps the most important was a Cooperrider and Srivastva 1987 publication called “Appreciative Inquiry Into Organizational Life”–published in the academic research series called “Research in Organization Development and change.” That article then 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
early 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 (its one of the reasons I offer it here for others to read) 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-ideation is practice and theory-building, as intervention, is a prime-time component in positive change. The script of tomorrow is not yet conceptualized. Writing the dissertation was one of the high point moments in my career, and the core of AI felt like a gift, coming from beyond, as if with a life and calling all its own. Every time I lacked courage, for example, the topic called out for more. There was a sense of meaning and purpose, and it was a thrill to be part of a birthing process. The metaphor is an apt one as Nancy and I cast our eyes on our first son Daniel Cooperrider and experienced the miracle of birth, on September 24th, 1984, during the most vital and deepest parts of the AI conceptualization. And the miracle metaphor mattered. For example Appreciative Inquiry 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.