Build on the Positive

BY RICARDO SALUDO



Listen in on Filipinos talking about the Philippines and you’re likely to hear one or both of two things: joking and laughter at ourselves and our situation, or a litany of complaints about our country and putdowns of ourselves as a people. Yet we score high on happiness surveys, even more than some of our far more prosperous neighbors, even though we are always quick to point out what’s wrong. The media’s tendency to focus our failings and foibles amplifies our negativism. At the end of this month, a two-day conference at the EDSA Shangri-La may be something our nation can use. The First Asian Appreciative Inquiry (AI) Summit on November 29 to 30 will bring together thought leaders in the art of seeing and building on the positive in organizations and society, focusing on what’s working, not what’s broken.

Among featured speakers are Local Government Secretary and multi-awarded mayor Jesse Robredo and veteran journalist Marites Vitug. Visiting from Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University is the keynote speaker, Dr. David Cooperrider, the originator and leading guru of appreciative inquiry.

Cooperrider has written 14 books and countless articles on the theory and practice of AI, which has adherents in many countries. He advises leading global corporations and is founding chairman of that Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit, at Case Western. In 2004, he designed and facilitated a UN summit on global corporate citizenship for then-Secretary General Kofi Anan and 500 business leaders.

Leading the summit organizers is AI’s top proponent in the Philippines, Antipolo-based Southeast Asia Interdisciplinary Development Institute (SAIDI) School of OD, which confers M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in organizational development. Headed by Dr. Rosalina Fuentes, SAIDI offers specializations in change leadership, microfinance, local development, social entrepeneurship, human capital management, enterprise leadership, transformative spirituality, and life coaching.

Most management theories and schools of thought concentrate on solving problems and filling gaps. AI asks and expounds upon the strengths of an organization as the starting point and foundation for its journey toward a better future. “All the studies in the world of negative states will tell us nothing about the positive preferred state,” argued Cooperrider in a February 2009 interview. His solution: look at the bright side, the qualities that shine and activities that work.

The AI guru explained that the dominant problem-oriented thinking in management sprang out of the mechanistic view of society and enterprises, which looks for what needs fixing in the machine at hand, which can be an enterprise, a community or a country. Lost in the obsession with problems are the strengths that have in fact propelled progress and growth.

Indeed, Cooperrider said, if you survey people with the question, “Does your company know your strengths and put your strengths into play everyday?” you get just 20 percent saying yes. That means four out of every five employees believe that their capabilities are not fully harnessed. Even if you cut that ratio by half, that still amounts to a sizable 40 percent of corporate brain and brawn wanting to do more.

AI’s core methodology is its four-D’s cycle: discovery, dream, design and destiny. Discovery involves appreciating what gives life and growth, the good things we have now, our sources of strength. Next, we dream, asking what might be, and envisioning the impact of our imaginings. Then we design with others the programs and structures to realize the vision in our dream. Finally, there is destiny, the drive to achieve and empower, learning and adjusting along the way toward the ultimate goal.

In keeping with his positive 4-Ds perspective, Cooperrider likens the process to the wonder and excitement of a child. “Why is uninhibited wonder something we generally restrict to children?” he asks in his OD Practictioner journal article, “The Child as Agent of Inquiry.” In one instructive story recounted in the piece, a 13-year-old student asks his school principal questions like what good things he did in his life and what he is most proud about.

Unlike his usual conversations with students on learning and discipline, the talk with the teenager animated the principal. “I really felt I was on the pulpit,” he recounted. “I was literally looking into the face of the future, exploring the elements of a good society. That night, I could not sleep. I kept replaying the conversation. I got back in touch with a lot of things important to me.”

Put another way, AI highlights the good and how an organization achieves it, which is what we, in our heart of hearts, really care about the most. Or as one writer put it, “you don’t see monuments to critics.” But there are countless statues of the poets, composers, painters and sculptors. Plainly, it is the poetry, music and art that inspire people, not the flaws that critics make it their business to point out.

Just like the principal interviewed by the student, the Cleveland Clinic in 1985 also felt the spark of inspiration from questions focusing on their strengths.

It was that transformative experience that led Cooperrider and his associates to develop the principles and practices of appreciative inquiry, eventually leading to his 1987 doctoral dissertation on AI.

Besides organizational development, the positive approach to addressing issues may even help in political and social conflicts. In his article on how AI could help bring peoce to the Middle East, Cooperrider writes: “Imagine hundreds or thousands of people coming together to generate new images of the world, and then leveraging those revelations for greater progress.” Considering that much conflict is fed by ugly memories of ills and injustices, one can see how the discord can begin to ebb through a 4-Ds shift of mind and discourse toward the good that contending peoples share now and what they could build together.

Perhaps one essential feature of appreciative inquiry that lends itself to both organizational development and peacemaking is its non-dual, consensus-building approach. In seeking the good that we all see and appreciate, AI helps diminish the rivalry between people’s individual perceptions and interests. The “democratization of mind” was how Cooperrider and two co-authors put it in their article on social construction and AI.

Given our eternally fractious, even violent politics, appreciative inquiry may well be just what the Philippines needs.

Ricardo Saludo heads the Center for Strategy, Enterprise & Intelligence ( ric.saludo@censeisolutions.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). CenSEI includes expert associates in organizational change management and executive coaching.